The Ephemerals

Plants known as ephemerals respond readily to spring's early warmth and fade back into the earth during the heat of summer. So I've read anyway. I bought my house in December. The yard, as far as I could tell, was grass bordered by curving beds of gravel. How Zen, I thought. Maybe I'll make hypertufa garden orbs, grow some herbs and vegetables in some big pots and call it a day. It's been a cold spring in here Minnesota, but in the last couple of weeks green things are rocketing out of the ground. There will be no room for garden orbs. I'm trying to make sense of it all, using an app on my phone to ID things and marveling at the fortitude of the plants pushing their way through a thick layer of black garden cloth and gravel. I'm also trying to make sense of the death of my friend Shanna, who left this Earth by her own hand not quite two weeks ago. As another friend put it, depression is a murderer and a liar. Shanna pushed her way through a layer of darkness, and I was in a writing group with her as she blossomed. I never shared a meal with her--or even a drink or a cup of coffee--our common ground was writing and struggle. Her own rough life gave her a nose for the sadness and pain of others.Shanna emailed me more than once when I was at the bottom to tell me to see her therapist. As I remember it she followed up with a phonecall. I went to the therapist. I made it out of the bottomless hole I was in. Shanna made it out too. She wrote a novel,Oh!You Pretty Things a few years ago that got all around fine reviews. She moved. I moved. We weren't ever see each other/talk regularly friends--and time and distance, well,you know how that goes. Things happened that I don't know about. Then Shanna got Covid in November and shared her struggle on Facebook. She was super sick. I posted on her wall like a zillion other friends. I PM-ed her now and then to not clutter up her wall of well-wishes, so numererous were the messages from friends and fellow writers. But she didn't get well and became a long-hauler. And overwhelmed by Covid and god knows what all, she took her life. Muffin and cupcake, she'd call me and the other writers in our group. Sweet cakes and sparkle pie. Shanna was a secret sauce of heart-aching empathy cut with wicked wit and profanity. Honestly, there was no one fucking like her. Not even close. I haven't felt like doing much this past ten days. I pull weeds and put comments from my fellow writers into the appropriate folders for the essays I'm trying to finish. I cut out images for collages, but don't make anything. I look at the Virgina bluebells in my gardern and think the word ephemeral. They'll be gone soon, I guess. But you wouldn't know it to look at them right now. Ephemeral.

I showed up for this.

I have been in the worst mood this past week. Not sleeping. Then sleeping during the day. I haven't been to yoga. I haven't shown up for myself in any way. I haven't been reading the manuscript I said I'd read for a friend. Last night I had a gin and tonic and a bowl of nuts for dinner. Tonight ice cream. In my pajamas. At 6 p.m. But I made a sign last night.

And today I showed up for this.

Some days I love my fellow humans. 

Dear fellow compassionate humans, I wish you well.

Signs, Proof, and the Buddha Makes Lemonade

This is proof.

That this happened this weekend.

And this.

But I have no proof of what I saw this evening when I went for a walk around the block. Looking in my patio window, I saw my mother reaching behind my cookbooks where I stash my unfinished bottle of wine. Her martini glass had been drained just minutes before, and I mistakenly thought that her body had forgotten the sea of alcohol that it had been afloat in for so long. Of late she's been congenial about her two-ounce martini. She might have seen me. But maybe not. The bottle of wine was tightly sealed with one of those vacuum corks, and when I returned (just minutes later,) it was still sealed. "That sure was a short walk," she said. "It was," I said.

And this novel I'm reading, "The Debt to Pleasure," by John Lanchester---SPOILER ALERT---overwhelmed me with its darkness this afternoon. I have no proof, but there are signs that our narrator is a psychopath who has murdered his parents and caused the death of  perhaps two household employees. The book is a feast of language and wit and actual recipes. Not to mention a banquet of arcana that regularly sends me on a Google tangent. BUT. Either I've figured out on page 111 where this story is going or my prediction of where it all will end is a sign of my own darkness. 

And I'm not sure what's going on here in my iPhoto as it interfaces with Blogger, but for the second time in recent months, a photo that I have not selected--a photo from months ago--has appeared in this post. It's a photo from Dan's memorial. I'm going to call it a sign. 

Getting Shit Done...About Grief!....About Caregiving!

Yes. The water was really that blue. And I found beach glass too.

Or as our 4-time governor, Jerry Brown, might say, Age quod agis. Do what you're doing is what this Latin phrase means, and according to the report I listened to on the car radio this morning, it's one of Brown's favorite Latin sayings. There was live coverage of Brown's inauguration, and I almost got weepy. I think he's the current politician I most respect.

I wrote in a previous post that I'm not making any resolutions this year, but if I were, Age quod agis would be a good one. Go ahead, take it if you need one. Meanwhile, I'm just trying to get shit done which is similar, but not exactly the same as doing what you are doing.

What got done today was finding a new desk chair for my mom (has to be ordered, darn) but finally she'll have a safe chair for her to sit in at her desk. The one without arms was pronounced as unsafe by her physical and occupational therapists. New yoga pants were purchased too which means the stretchy pants that I bought after starting Jazzercise about 20 or so years ago can be retired. Honestly, those two pairs of pants really did get worn to the gym most weeks for almost two decades, but I felt I was in danger of stretching up into downward dog and suddenly finding my ass hanging out. Now I have three brand new pairs of identical black yoga pants. (Yeah, I went to Catholic school for 12 years and wore a uniform every day, why do you ask?)

And I waited on hold for 14 minutes to speak to someone at the City of Baltimore, only to find that my memory did serve me correctly, and that yes, it's perfectly acceptable to pay my mom's health insurance premium weeks late in January because that is just how the City of Baltimore likes to start the new year. They will get those invoices in the mail in a couple of weeks. Any other month that you pay late, you'll get a cancellation letter announcing that your policy will be cancelled within twelve days of the date on the letter. Which in my mom's case would be a financial debacle of proportions similar to what Jerry Brown took on with California's debt after Schwarzenegger's reign.

And also under the heading of unhappy tidings, I researched the cost of a power washing service to clean my boat dock which, as has been called to my attention by the HOA, needs a thorough cleaning. I'm normally all into maintenance and cleaning, but since I really don't get away to kayak anymore, it's like outta sight, outta mind. I'm the disgrace of the neighborhood.

And I am monitoring the fuck out of my mental health. I plan to take the month of January to record my lack of wellbeing in some cogent way and consider getting back on some meds. For those of you in a similarly leaky boat, I found some worthwhile things here:

Resolutions after a Trauma
Your Resolution Absolution
Self Portraits of Living after Loss

And in the caregiving department, I found THIS immensely helpful as I pondered whether or not it would be okay to try and get my mom into assisted living.

And meanwhile, here in Pillville, I'm doing what I do.

Pillville--Where the days are getting longer.

More daylight at dinner time enhances the conversation between my mother and me. "I think I see a light on in the 3rd floor condo across the way," becomes 'Look at that dog!" or "Don't you think that girl should be wearing a jacket?" Soon there will be hummingbirds and more boats going out, more joggers, more babies in strollers. It's probably just enough to keep both of us from going insane.

Simple observations in the moment are much easier than discussing what's gone on in a day. My mom asks a lot of questions about current goings on that she doesn't remember getting answers to. And I  either don't correct her at all, or I simply answer the question as if she's asking it for the first time--M is taking the plane, not the train to New York. Our houseguests left yesterday, not today--I do get to feeling a bit looney myself. Wait? Did they leave today? Or sad. As the tide lapped into the marina last night, my tears began rising too.

I walked after dinner for the first time in a a couple of months. It seems a workable compromise if I walk around and around the block. When I get to the marina side where the sidewalk passes by the patios of all the houses, I can look in and see my mother tidying the kitchen or standing at the end of the kitchen island reading the newspaper on the iPad. If she disappears, I stop walking and go inside. Last evening, the fresh air and the water was enough to settle me and bring me back to realizing things are really working out pretty well here in Pillville.

Still, Friday evenings are the hardest. I think we all have these rhythms. Tide in. Tide out.  If I am going to wake worrying, it's always between 3:00 and 3:30. I am almost never grumpy or pessimistic in the morning. At 4:p.m. I would like all the cake in the world. To myself. Go away. Or bring me coffee--then go away. I am incredibly thankful, however, that Friday nights are not as hard as they used to be.  I'm pretty sure I would not have survived without my dogs.

But, as always, Friday nights turn into Saturday mornings. And they pretty much always look like this here in Margaritaville.

My mother has had four or five good days in a row--outside of some tiredness, she hasn't had any severe pain or nausea. For the last couple of nights, she's stayed awake and engaged all through dinner without the narcoleptic moments that can come on so quickly it's as if someone has exchanged the salt for slumber dust.

And it's almost springtime. I have the urge to clean things. I took up the very dirty carpet squares in front of the couch. I bought some new pillows and a pouf at the Cost Plus sale. Orange! Orange! More daylight! Orange! I am drunk with light and color. Drunk on the beauty of Margaritaville, sans the Margarita. Which is kind of a miracle.

I Don't Care--A Cautionary Tale

I slept in this bed just as it appears here for two nights this past week. One of them in my clothes with sand in the cuffs of my jeans. Outside the frame of this photo are heaps of books intermingling with dust bunnies and that trail of books continues down the steps to the front hall where my mother has stacked the books she wanted out of her room. Until the man who loves me arrived on Sunday morning, the bathroom trash had begun to overflow onto the floor. Suffice it to say that I had motivational problems this week. While downstairs I managed to keep up appearances as my mother's cheery cook and companion, upstairs I became surly and apathetic muttering about all the things I didn't care about. Just like Pierre. My daughters would gasp when I read this book by Maurice Sendak to them. I loved the fact that Sendak had the balls to let the lion eat that miserable little boy. Of course, Pierre got a second chance when a doctor was able to retrieve him, whole and unscathed. And I'm giving myself a second chance too. Of course, this being real life, that would be for this week.

Last evening the man who loves me and I arrived at the beach just as the big orange ball of the sun dropped behind the islands. We approached the sand from the park and walked through an opening in the dunes with palm trees at a tilt framing the vista you see below. "This looks like the set for a movie where people are seeing California for the first time, blown away by its beauty," he said--or something like that. Even native Californians cannot believe how beautiful this place is.

Each day the beach is different in dozens of ways. The waves, the wind, the sky and its clouds, the birds. Is the tide in or out? Are there dolphins? Whales? Sea lions?
Behold, the beauty. Where every day seems like second chance.

Train Crashes into Iceberg

I'm not sure when my personal Polar Express derailed. The train wreck was already unfolding long before the end of my marriage. In the decade before we had children, The Someone and I frequently traveled back to the Midwest to spend the holidays with family. The year that our second child was born delivered the coldest Iowa winter on record. The airlines lost the children's car seats, our winter coats, and all our luggage. It was days before I had anything to wear besides my brother's sweatpants, and The Someone complained for years that the muscle cramps in his back were due to being underdressed while pulling our three-year-old on a sled. But it was probably carrying our hatless, coatless baby inside my shirt from the airport door to the curb and into my brother's drafty truck in sub-zero weather that convinced us we should to create our own Christmas traditions in Los Angeles.

Other than the gingerbread house baked from scratch and the sugar cookies, not much stuck to the free- floating iceberg of our lives away from family. There were a couple years of dad and daughter forays to choose a Christmas tree, several years of big festive dinners with friends. There were a few years at the same favorite restaurant for Christmas Eve dinner A few years of a Christmas carol Mass at the church The Someone attended--for which we routinely forgot to bring the de rigueur gift for needy children. Some years I cooked salmon. Some years I have no idea what we ate. Gifts for our children figured quite prominently into the celebration when they were younger, but The Someone and I never shopped together for them--or even discussed what they might like--that I can recall. Our 1950s division of labor required that I tend to those sorts of errands while he made the money. We bought gifts for one another, of course--in the early years before children, quite lovely sentimental things. Later when there was money he bought me diamond earrings, pearls, a beautiful outfit, or a cashmere sweater. But, in the later years, as the pressures at work pulled The Someone away from us for more and more hours, as our appetites for everything diminished, as our marriage lodged into some kind of permanent solstice, Christmas seemed like a charade.

My gifts from The Someone became more and more impersonal, and the things I chose for him never quite hit the mark. Books remained unread, a scarf stayed in its box, the whimsical choice of a 6 ft. tall farm windmill never went to his office as I thought it might. The daughters stockings were filled with the same lip balm, the same lotions--until we did away with gift-giving all together. No one in our house really needed anything, and if there was something Mr. Ex and I wanted, well, those desires went undetected on our personal radar.

I had my chance to reinvent Christmas when the marriage ended, but I didn't. The daughters were pretty much grown--and Thanksgiving is our day for gathering together. As my son's birthmother, while I'm not regarded by him as superfluous, I am wary of elbowing into the traditions created by the parents who raised him. So each year has been different since 2007. Hawaii, St. Paul, home--which has, itself, changed again this year. The man who loves me and I don't make a big deal out of Christmas either. We'll eat dinner at my place with my mother tonight, and tomorrow he'll go off to his sister's place. But I'm searching for something. Not religion. Not material things. Just something, or some place, or a purpose I can look forward to during the darkest week of the year.

While I remain silent for a bit...

...take a look at some of my favorite blogs in my side bar. I especially enjoyed The Perils of Divorced Pauline as she muses on the pitfalls of turning 50.

Another Fascinating News Item about Depression

I read this after seeing the link on a blog I love.  Mrs. Moon's blog itself is a pretty good antidote to depression, but for those of you who are adventurous, there might be something new coming down the pike.

Chances for LSD and mushrooms presented themselves to me back in the day. Unfortunately, I'd already had some experience hallucinating on morphine in the hospital. Think bloodbath. The blood rising from the floor like someone had turned on a tap in a bathtub. Blood dripping from the ceiling and running down the walls. Who needs more of that?

I'll have to find other ways of "letting my senses run free." Maybe if the doors of perception could be cracked open, the sky would always look like the way it did tonight as I walked home from the train.

My Brain is Just Fine

I listened intently to every word of a news story about depression on NPR this morning--the gist of it being that maybe the brains of depressed people really aren't broken, i.e. suffering from a chemical imbalance. That's an old idea, the story said; the whole lack of serotonin thing is a myth that just won't die. There's probably something going on with genetic predisposition, they said,  but there was an experiment where the subjects had the serotonin removed or deactivated from their brains, and they did not become depressed! How about that?

I've worried a lot about my serotonin. I felt better, in some ways, on anti-depressants, but I hate pills. Well, no, actually, I'm afraid of pills. The thought of side-effects is enough to turn me into a side-effectechondriac. Reading the disclosure on the medication I was taking was almost more depressing than being depressed. But I was really, really in trouble, and I knew it, so I took it.

Eventually I stopped. I was okay-ish. My divorce heartbreak was subsiding. But I still had a lot of negative stuff going on. The anxiety was killing me, but I didn't want to get back on the pills for a third run. (Third time might be an unlucky charm, right?) Finally I went to a therapist, and it helped a lot--which is what the piece on NPR claimed that talk therapy can work just as well.

So now, I'm thinking, my brain is just fine. My brain is fine. Yes, a ton of stuff has gone wrong since I was 16. (The litany goes like this: secret pregnancy that results in first child being given up for adoption, tragic car crashes, father dies suddenly, I'm hospitalized for twice for gruesome spinal surgeries, serious money trouble, two horrid depressions after subsequent children, years living with a man who wanted out but wouldn't say he wanted out while I pretended everything would be fine.) And yeah, everyone has a lot of stuff that goes wrong--some way more horrible than anything on my list, but maybe what I have is circumstances combined with a genetic predisposition, and I never have to worry about serotonin again.

I do feel I need to exercise full out every single day, take it easy with the wine, and just keep moving on down the road from Divorceville to Margaritaville, but as I make that move, it's good to think of  my brain as a lovely healthy brain.

Winter Solstice

"How have you been feeling?" the man who loves me asked this morning as we lay in bed. It's hard to give an accurate answer to that question in that setting, in those circumstances.
"I think I'd be feeling fine," I said, "if I could just get The Someone's signature on the last two divorce documents." We talked for a little longer. Got up. Had our toast and coffee and went our separate ways.

Instead of walking Humane Society dogs right after exercising, I went home to pursue the missing pages--(mistake #1.) I'm not sure what mistake #2 or #3 was, but the cold-bloodedness of the whole thing tsunami-ed over me about two minutes after I walked in the door. I don't buy the argument that The Someone is just trying to hang on to me, that he doesn't want to sever those last connections. It's torture he wants. Drawing it out and making me ask, and ask, and ask. Back when I was going to therapy, my therapist told me that I was being treated the same in my divorce as I was treated in my marriage. It explained a lot.

What it doesn't explain is this feeling of sometimes still wanting my family intact. How could I want that given what I have now contrasted with how I was treated then? What warped reasoning possesses me to wonder what we might be doing for Christmas if...? To imagine all of us together in some snowy respite gathered around a fire, or under a beach umbrella in a tropical paradise, or even in the same room of our house for an hour when the likelihood of any of those things actually happening would be approximately zilch.

Still, that thought is the elephant in the room inside my head. The elephant that keeps me from seeing the gifts in front of me. The beast that blocks out the sunlight. And then I crawl into bed for hours because I feel as though I am literally freezing to death, and it's the only way I can get warm.

I think more and more about gender roles these days, and how I was so completely conditioned to wear the apron, how filled up my little head was with princesses and happy endings. How I would have done anything to save the idealized version of my nuclear family dancing like sugar plums inside my head, all the while waiting for happiness to drift down like the perfect snow in a snow globe. What I needed was a hammer to smash it all to bits, crack open the plastic, and let some honesty in.

I know all of that. I'm just having trouble feeling it. So on this the darkest day of the year, I will keep turning, turning, turning toward the light.

Water

I don't know what it is about me and water.
There are sandbags outside my back door and it's been pouring so hard for the last couple of hours that it's like looking through a scrim.
I can now claim that two men have crawled around in the water to rescue my abode. Mr. Ex was the first one. Several  years ago after a pipe burst in the middle of the night and flooded our downstairs, I walked into our kitchen to discover him on hands and knees, wearing only a t-shirt, sopping up the mess with pool towels. Then came an invasion of mold that required a re-do of our entire downstairs, and we ended up moving out--or, more accurately, our daughter and I ended up moving out. Mr. Ex elected to stay at the house. Which I find very interesting in retrospect.
This morning the man I love lay on his belly on a tarp on my sodden patio in the drizzle, a hammer drill sheltered in a plastic bag as he bored holes into my patio wall so the water could find its way to the slope on the other side.
It was water that called my name after the divorce when I thought my life should end. Bridges were so enticing that I kept my curtains drawn during one entire stay at the St. Paul Hotel. At night when it was quiet, even with the windows closed, I thought I could hear the rushing of the river. The sound of the water was like a voice asking me to come to its side.
I love the water. Traveling by boat. Swimming in a pool or a calm sea.  I recently purchased a travel snorkel that curls up into the size of a bagel. I have a special bath mat with a pillow for soaking in the tub--but I love long showers so much I hardly use it.
I'm just not sure how water feels about me.

The Hurt He Gave

I have softened the hurt with milky tea and roses. With beer in green glass bottles. With airplane gin. With red wine, the oak lingering on a lover’s tongue segueing to the morning’s kisses and espresso. I’ve softened the hurt at my mother’s kitchen table, in the company of Iowa songbirds and in my daughters’ cars on I-80, and the Lincoln Highway. I’ve softened the hurt lying on the floor with dogs, around the Monopoly board, with a handful of Canasta, and breathing in the dark with a grandchild in the crook of my arm. The hurt, the hurt. The hurt of a bed too wide wrestled and lost to dirt trails and ragged steps cut out of mountainsides leading to blinding white chapels high above the Aegean. The hurt lost to ancient stones and bridges spanning dark waters, to blizzard and dessert, to lake and plain. I am a traveler now, and the hurt tried to find me but I'm the one who is finding, finding, finding.

It might have been the full moon that made me do it. I called Mr. Ex while I was in France. I was begging for mercy, I sobbed to his voicemail--asking him to please co-operate in the division of our joint assets. I'd been waiting for weeks for a response to an email I'd sent him in which we went dancing around again over how things should be divided--but there was no response and I was feeling desperate. Maybe you'd like to suggest a revision because I simply have no more steam for this, I wrote in the email. I want all of this to be over, I want a life where I don't ever have to discuss dividing anything with you again. So, please, you propose something, please. Soon, please. I ask you to imagine what it would be like, really really like for you if the tables were turned. Go ahead imagine it. Somewhere between the email and the phone call, I depression-dialed my sister-in-law and it was 4 a.m. and luckily she didn't have her phone turned on. I think it's the lack of engagement that makes me feel so crazy--the silence, the nothing.

So all I hear is the clock ticking.

Time elapsed since Mr. Ex left: 2 years, 2 months, 3 weeks, 1 day and approximately 6 hours.

My attorney fees so far: Roughly $15,000.00

Sunday Sunset

I saw a jumbo jet glinting in the sunlight tonight while I was walking my dogs and wished I was on it.  Sorry, dogs.  It seems ridiculous to me that more than 15 months after my marriage ended, I  still  have not adjusted.  I have a lovely townhouse.  I live with 2 dogs and 2 cats. When I turn out my reading light at night, the dogs come over to the side of the bed for a final pat on the head. The timid cat who spends her time licking the hair off her legs while living in my downstairs bathroom cabinet comes out of hiding and settles down on the foot of my bed.  The other cat moves closer and purrs. So what is my problem?  The problem is that it's Sunday night--the one night of the week when I used to eat dinner with my husband (I know--how pitiful is that?!) and as I was walking those sweet dogs and looking up at the jetliner, I actually thought, I should be walking to dinner with Mr. Ex right now.  Is there no hope?

My son once told me that being adopted is like being in the witness protection program. Divorce is like that too. Your past is wiped out. You're supposed to forget it and move on.  Be someone else.  Erase your history.  Good thing I'm not in the witness protection program because I'd be fucking failing and would have a bullet in my brain by now.

So here's the score: 30 yr. marriage--over.  4 month relationship--over.  Coffee date--lukewarm.  Dinner date--no indigestion; just bland.  Full moon Athens/internet/telephone romance and possible friendship--over because I felt like burning a bridge out of spite. Internet and telephone correspondence: over due to the fact that I'm not OVER the divorce.  Internet correspondence--over because I'm not OVER  the divorce.  Okay, I admit it, I'm not over the divorce.  So sue me.

There'll Always Be Another You

Good-bye, Mr. Pill.

This is it for us.  I'm finished. Through. This past while, I haven't felt great when I was with you anyway.  I felt numb and dull and while, not depressed exactly, I wasn't happy either.  I'm fine with being sad now and then, even though it probably annoys you, but at least the ecstatic seems accessible again.  The divine, the too-good-to-be true-but-might-actually-be-true is possible. Maybe even probable.  And all of that will happen without you.