august 2021

I woke up this morning in a cloud of white bedding, with my twelve-year old son asleep next to me. He had crawled in at some point in the night. The window was open and a cool breeze wafted in as the ceiling fan slowly ticked overhead. I put my hand on his back, which is edging toward muscularity out of soft, skinny childhood. I saw a woman at school drop-off carrying a baby that was like him at nine months; light as a little feather. He pulled my hand and arm around him, cradling my hand up toward his heart in his half-sleep. The cat was lying just on the other side of me, purring a slow insistence.

I got up; already running behind. Violet woke up and decided to barricade herself in her bedroom with stuffed animals before noticing she was hungry and calling out what to do, to which I suggested she lower herself out the second story window with her robe tie. She emerged, shoveling aside the mountain of bug-eyed animals. I buzzed around making lunches and cleaning messes that appeared like mushrooms after rain behind the kids. I left for a run while they ensconced in cartoons, leaving explicit instructions I knew they would fail at to get ready the rest of the way before school.

As I ran all the music felt stale on my playlist. I couldn’t hear the songs anymore, and they dredge up emotions of queasy losses, half-asked, half-answered questions. My thoughts centered on Robert, primarily, my mind creating a half-hearted case for the prosecution - why we ought to break up - while another part of me spoke for the defense, bringing witnesses comprised of memories of his body in the night, flying with him in his tiny plane over the northern California coastline, his piratical smile, him waiting for me at midnight on his front steps when I drove to him out of a darkened panic. We have been together now one exact calendar year. This time last year there were terrible fires, and on our second date his house was under an evacuation warning. He dismissed the danger, so intent on seeing me again. At dinner when the waitress asked how we were doing, he responded, “we are falling in love.”

I arrived back at home from my run five minutes before needing to leave for school with Violet. I found both kids, of course, three layers deep in screens (tv, laptop, Nintendo device), with shoes off, backpacks scattered, and breakfast gloppy and uneaten. I became the yelling exasperated version of myself, astonished despite having seen the exact same scenario without fail every morning of their lives, in which they somehow manage to be utterly oblivious to the passage of time and the necessity to complete certain tasks prior to a deadline else they face the unutterable hellscape that is elementary or middle school on an empty stomach with unbrushed teeth and a disorganized backpack. I yelled at Violet to eat her cereal despite it having become unrecognizable sogginess. She took a bite and then saw a bug was floating in it which led to all holy hell breaking loose as I nagged and whined at top volume that she stop freaking out and put some food in her piehole this second and we had to leave right now. Simon got confused about his departure time and I said a couple snotty things to him about his inability to stay on track and read time. Then I tried, based on some distant awareness of the lack of funds in his future psychotherapy bank account, to tell him I love him and to have a good day as I left to walk Violet to school.

And then I come home with two unprecedented free hours with which to ponder the fact of a writing assignment. I have some sense of an attempt to become some version of self that is vaguely different from that which I currently am. I do not find myself particularly good at love, although I scrape by with a B minus; I do the basics plus an occasional extra-credit project. I am decently effective in my work. Childhood fantasies of being a hell of a lot more are relinquishing into the humble acknowledgement of that which I actually am, belaying between anxiety and grandiosity. I do have some skill in listening, and my mind can make some charming connections between things. I’ll hand that to myself. But perhaps it’s the Lexapro I am now taking at highest dosage, or the estrogen fleeing my system post-haste: I have a sense of the futility of the whole project of this life that nonetheless does not free me from engaging with its each and every demand.

So it’s true. This middle-aged, middle-class life I am ensconced in does not immediately appear to have much purpose beyond its own sustenance. The kids were tucked in on either side of me in bed the other night as we read Harry Potter out loud and I joked about my dying (I am known for my excellent sense of humor) and said how it would just be like any good Disney movie in which the parent always dies. Violet assured me that the most distressing part of that scenario would be the dead body lying next to her.

I’m going to go small. Tiny moments of beauty must be where I stake my claim. When we take the Eucharist it is just one tiny wafer and drop of wine. Anything bigger than that is too big right now. I have the envelope with the skiff of Dad’s ashes that couldn’t easily siphon back into the big bag still in the kitchen, propped in the napkin holder. It is marked “Dad” so I don’t accidentally try to pay a bill with that envelope. I talk to him through the day, and imagine him listening in and gently laughing or when I am terrible, he just gets quiet and waits for me to come around.

I am wearing the hundred-year old ring Robert secretly bought for me from an antique store; a big blue stone encircled with tiny crystals in a filigreed silver setting. I fell in love with it but didn’t buy it because it was utterly too small; a size one and a half; showed it to him, dreamt about it that night and went back to the store the next day to find it gone. He surprised me with his having been the one to have purchased it and had it re-sized without my knowing.

Violet sings in the bathtub. She makes muffins with me and persists in cracking eggs by exploding them in her hands; each one a tiny roadside IED she fails to defuse. My mom lives in a tiny house behind mine on the same property. She has a steady boyfriend and they disappear into her house off the deck after a couple drinks; re-emerge an hour later clothes visibly rumpled. Simon has suddenly taken to saying, “I love you, Mom” several times per day. Perhaps he is finally actually terrified I might sell him into slavery and he is trying to preclude that eventuality but for now, I will just take it at face value.

In addition to small, I’m going to go for diverse. That’s another lesson of the Eucharist; always that communion line of utterly ridiculous beautiful terrible humans. I believe the utopian vision of a uniform humanity brought into peacefulness by an application of derived universal mandates will result in a kind of hell; the history of utopian visions suggests that to be true. And so this means a whole new approach to the batshittery of Robert’s political ideology. One of true and actual celebratory curiosity. If he is getting his news off TikTok and delivered via carrier pigeons only recently escaped from the state hospital, it is my task to understand how and why he is thinking the way he is. More than likely I am just as or more deluded than him.

George Saunders said that “the only non-delusional response to the human condition is kindness”. I ask for the feather-touch of the holy spirit over this life of mine; mediocre, beautiful, pointless, small.