Hurricane, also his birthday

The most major hurricane to ever hit my little island is making landfall as I type this, on the morning of my husband’s birthday. Our kids, their loves, and our nieces are coming over for cake and pizza this evening. We’ll all no doubt be huddled around the weather channel seeking news of how everyone is faring back home. We are, most of us, immigrants and the children of immigrants. In crises, our first home looms large. I suppose, other than skin, this is the reason many immigrants are seen as “other.” Because we have two homes. We never do relinquish the birth land. It lives on within us. It helped shape who we are. And today, my birth land is besieged. Our loved ones there are hunkered down. The family reunion chat has been taken over with Hurricane Melissa updates from all corners of the island. This hurricane is a slow moving monster. Dangerous storm surges are expected on the heels of 185 mph winds and forty inches or more of rain. Landslides in the mountains. Not all homes in the country areas are sturdy. We’ll have to reclaim and rebuild in the aftermath, helping in whatever small and large ways we can. 

Meanwhile, this loved guy. We’re going to celebrate him on this day, too.

This is ever the way

I have a consult with a therapist tomorrow to see if I will work with her. I worry that from her photos she looks young, barely older than my own children, and what if she knows them in these intersecting circles we inhabit. Because I will certainly talk about my children, about the particular loneliness of releasing them to their adult lives, of trusting them to navigate the rapids without my help, when all I want to do is hold their hand and guide them surely through life’s eddies the way I did when they were children, ensuring they would make it safely to the other side, physical and emotional bodies intact. 

Will a youngish therapist understand the bereft feeling that older mothers of adult children must find a place for when they realize it is the companion that has come to stay, the shadow that accompanies you everywhere, that hides behind your smile, your fierce functionality in the world, the times you will yourself not to send one more intrusive text, knowing your children are busy with their lives, remembering when you were busy with your life and assumed your own mother was going about her days, too, and she was doing that, she was fiercely functional, after all, where do you think you learned it, never mind the shadow companion you never saw.

Or maybe you glimpsed its presence sometimes, in the faraway look in her eyes, which you failed to recognize as sadness, as she released you, again and again, to your chock full life, knowing this is the way of parents such as she was, she would have it no other way, she would merely wait in the wings should you ever need her, she knew you knew she would always be there, the net arrayed beneath you, faint as gossamer, sturdy as her limitless love, this is ever the way.

__________

Scrolling on social media this morning I ran across a post that made me pause because I am contemplating reentering therapy. A woman wrote:

I told my therapist one day: "I'm not suicidal. I just don't want to be here anymore."

She looked at me softly and said, "There's a kind of suicidal no one talks about. Not the kind that screams, but the kind that fades. The kind that sounds like 'I'm just tired!' 'I don't want to do this anymore!' 'What if I didn't wake up tomorrow?'" And then she paused.

That silence hit harder than anything. Because she was right. I still got up every day. I still smiled when people asked how I was. I still replied to messages with, "I'm fine." But inside? I was gone. Numb. Hollow. Floating through my own life like a ghost. And people called it "burnout." Or "just stress." But I knew better. It wasn't exhaustion. 

It was grief.

Grief for the years I held it together when no one held me. Grief for the life that demanded performance, not presence. Grief for becoming "the strong one" before I ever felt safe enough to be weak. And the cruel part? No one noticed. Because I was still functioning. Still showing up. Too considerate to fall apart where anyone could see. That's the kind of pain that almost takes you out—the invisible kind. The quiet kind. The "I'm fine" kind.

My therapist told me, “Sometimes the bravest thing you'll ever do is finally stop pretending to be okay." And maybe that's where healing begins—not in strength, but in surrender.

__________

Alone in my house on Sunday morning, my husband running the tech at church, the sun at my window setting gold leaves aflame, I read what that woman wrote and when I got to the word grief the sobs just broke. I had no idea they were right there at the surface, so quick to ambush me. And now wont stop. 

We keep on.

The week in review

I put up a post about the ICE invasions of Portland and Chicago but apparently only one reader was able to see it. Another reader commented that my latest post was not "notifying or showing," which made me wonder if I was being shadow banned. Very curious. It was mostly sobering photos that we've all seen anyway, images of home grown troops tear gassing and pointing military grade weapons at our own—sights none of us ever thought we'd see playing out on the streets of the land we call home. None of this is news to any of us. 

Over in my corner of the world, life is lifing, as my girl likes to say. People I love are dealing with some stuff, which I can't talk about, but which makes my heart feel as if its being squeezed in a fist, each breath shallow and incomplete, and I walk around distracted, wondering why things can't just get to a place of being settled and stay that way indefinitely. Life is always in a process of upheaval, even when it seemed one minute before that everything was just calmly going along. Some upheavals are manageable and even cheerful. Others are like a two by four to the side of the head. The life lessons never fucking stop. Why do we always have to be learning and growing and getting wiser? Can't we just be dumb and happy and insensible for a while?

A couple of mornings ago, in those moments just after waking, before rising to greet the day, when you're just drifting in your thoughts, it occurred to me that one day I will be dead and all of this will cease to matter, I won't care about any of it, and I didn't know whether that recognition was a sign of mental health or of psychosis. It did help me take a few full breaths before the dull pervasive worry came flooding back. I'm a little better now, more philosophical. What good is it to obsess about things over which I have no control? If only one could apply logic to these matters.

I did call a therapist for a consultation. No call back yet. I have the number of another therapist. Perhaps I'll reach out to her, too, cover the bases. It's probably time.

In other news, I might have a new project in the offing, if we can come to terms. I hope we can. I've become very interested in doing the project, even though I turned it down three times. But the editor kept coming back, saying the person was very interested in me, that there was no time constraint and he was willing to wait because he thought I was the perfect person. Now that I have had a chance to study the situation more closely I see why he thinks that, certain of our experiences align. And now I am wildly intrigued. Now I'm the one hoping that everything comes to fruition. Ah well, if it is meant to be, it will be. I emailed the editor this morning saying I had delivered my last project and was ready to talk. We shall see what unfolds. Breathe, my darling girl. Breathe.

Speaking of darling girls, my daughter and I had one of our theater dates last Thursday. She wanted to see Beetlejuice, a musical I had no interest in, but I always have great interest in spending time with my girl, so I agreed to join her. We went to one of our special dinners beforehand, at Hav & Mar, which is Chef Marcus Samuelsson's Chelsea eatery. The food, a mix of Southern American and Scandinavian cuisine, was divine. The chef himself was in the house, and he passed by our table and greeted us, which was like a celebrity sighting, very exciting, even in this city where one sees stars at every turn.

Spending that evening with my girl was definitely the highlight of my week. And look, I managed not to wear my usual theater-going uniform, though my seasonal red scarf was very much in evidence. I said to my husband the other day, have you ever noticed that I wear clothes in rotation, that certain outfits appear over and over for stretches of time, no variation? I noticed that before we were married, he said. I was this way as a teenager, too. Every day after school, I'd grab my dad's freshly washed blue pinstripe shirt that I'd purloined, from off the clothes line and change into it from my school uniform, just like the day before. I think it's my way of avoiding decision fatigue.

Small moments that swell the heart

My husband is in the kitchen chopping up celery and onions and thyme and potatoes to make Manhattan clam chowder. "It's soup season," he announced as he assembled his ingredients before getting started. It's blustery and cold outside, a Nor'easter expected to flood coastal areas overnight, but in here, it feels cozy. Yesterday, he went out and bought flowers to make Ikebana arrangements using driftwood he picked up on a walk by the river with our son two weeks ago. He transported the blooms home in the tote bag his son in law gave him from his flower side hustle. Today, I get to rest my gaze on these lovely visual moments just sitting on tables inside my home. Here are two of them. 

Last Thursday, I went to choir practice on the East Side, a make-up rehearsal, as I’d missed my usual Wednesday afternoon West Side rehearsal due to a scheduled conference call in which I was to get my subject’s brother’s notes on the manuscript. I thought he would have edits for me—he had been my subject’s sports agent and the negotiator of all her contracts, and I’d interviewed him several times during the book writing process. We thought it best for him to read and make sure we’d got the legal details and timelines correct before we turned the final draft in to the publisher. Turns out we had, and our call ended up being a delightful hour in which he told me all the different parts of the narrative that he loved, and why. I really hope our editor is as positive about the book as my subject and her brother seem to be. We submit the final tomorrow, so we will have that answer soon enough.

And this: In talking about whether my name would be on the book’s cover (never a given in ghostwriting, a term I avoid using but which most people more readily understand), my subject said not only was she happy to give co-writing credit but that she would feel honored to have my name on the cover with hers. We were on the phone so she couldn’t see that actual tears sprang to my eyes. I have rarely encountered such a gentling down of literary ego. Granting a collaborative writer cover credit is acknowledgement enough of the work we have done together, but to say the rest—well. I cleared the frog in my throat and told her I would be honored to have my name next to hers, too.

A really cool thing happened when I got home from choir on Thursday afternoon. I’d gone for coffee after with two friends, which made my timing perfect, because as soon as I walked into my house my son called and told me to come downstairs to the street. He said that he and his crew were on their way back to their home firehouse after covering for a station in Harlem whose crew was out at a fire, and they were going to swing by in the big rig to tell me hey. He joked that it was bring your work to mom day. Seeing my boy jump down from the rig and cross the street to bring his mama over to meet the guys, I felt proud to bursting. I took pictures with his crew and his lieutenant and chatted with them and loved the brotherly camaraderie among them all. As his sister says, my son is just about the coolest kid we know. 

Here's something serendipitous: I might already know what my next project will be and I’m cautiously excited. I really think sometimes I was born lucky. At the very least, I’m hopeful.

Earth school

I ran across one of those frivolous social media memes that asked questions. One was: Who comes to mind as simply the most delightful human you know, the most delicious person to be around. My husband was sitting at the breakfast bar and I tossed it out to him to answer with me. We looked at each other and smiled, because we both knew, hands down, the answer was our daughter. It is not that our girl never has dark moods, never gets grumpy, never spirals into anxiety (look who her mother is), but she carries a light inside and around her. Somehow, when she walks into a room, the mood brightens, joy arrives, and she doesn't even know she has this power. Her smile is a radiant thing. It literally warms you, makes you feel that all will be well. She is a healer, that one, without even doing anything, even as she herself struggles through the whole rollercoaster repertoire of human experiences. How does she manage this duality? How does she confer such grace on others even in those moments when she is roiling herself? I wish I could save her from every hard emotional passage in this life. Is it too much to wish that our children should never suffer? Ha. Fortunately, she's does talk therapy, and so she is a student in the ways of actively managing the ever surging feelings and perceptions that are a feature, not a bug, of this earth school. 

I love that photo of our girl. It's from a shoot she did in her cousin's kitchen in Dallas. She makes her signature caramel apple pies every Thanksgiving, and wanted new photos for her website where people log on to make their orders. While she was in Dallas a few weeks ago, she decided her cousin's kitchen would make an elegant backdrop for those photos, so she baked a pie and pressed another cousin, who is a talented image maker and social media coordinator for Marvel Comics Universe, into service to take the photos. In years past, my girl baked the pies in her kitchen, but this year, she reached out to her godmother, who has a cake baking company and works out of an industrial kitchen in Brooklyn, to see if she could rent space alongside her during the week before Thanksgiving. Her aunt said she didn't need to pay her any rent, but she did need to get herself professionally certified before she could use the kitchen, so she's now doing that. Our girl is scaling up. 

Happy birthday my darling boy

My firstborn, whom I’ve loved with my whole entire soul and being long before this life and will love far beyond it, turns 34 today. He and his sweetheart happen to be at a wedding in Rhode Island on this birthday, one of his former housemates from junior year, when he lived with three women from his college track team. This is the fifth wedding he and his wife have attended this year I believe, their round of nuptials continues. My daughter in law sent me a photo, noting that with so many weddings on their dance card, she’s decided to simplify her life by wearing the same dress if the invitation list doesn’t overlap. Girl after my own heart, I thought. “Wise woman!” I texted her. I love that I can count on her to send me a picture of them all spruced up in different parts of the country or the world, when they travel celebrate the union of their friends. Happy birthday, my sweet boy. You and I may clash wills sometimes, though mercifully less lately, but you clearly know how to be a friend, as so many people from past eras and areas of your life continue to hold you close, and want to present on their special day.

Popsicle and puzzle

 I can’t even post, really. Sometimes it’s too much. 

But here’s a picture. A space holder. Evidence of the good. 

We keep on. 

Okay, I'm going to try and mark those three wonderful days when my niece, her husband, and their magical child were here from Dallas with us, because together we created the kinds of experiences that help us keep on, that help us remember that even when the news is too terrible to bear—the lynched boy on a college campus down south who they tried to say hanged himself; the warrantless nighttime raid on an apartment building in Chicago, with doors bashed in and apartments trashed and naked children, citizens of this country, zip tied and thrown into UHaul vans with their bewildered and terrified parents; the 44-boat flotilla bringing food to a starving people, only to have their mission of mercy violently thwarted by the marauding state, and dear god, who prevents the delivery of food to people who are dying of starvation; the answer, of course, is those who are intent on their expiration—even when all that makes the heart heavy as lead, there are still those memories we made with this precious little girl last weekend, and we must not lose sight of such goodness. So here's another photo for posterity. We women, all of the tribe of Gloria, each one of us just a bit OCD, crowded around a jigsaw puzzle and who but little Harper sat in our midst, matching pieces with the rest of us, three generations of women folk in this meditation we all enjoy. It was lovely.