{my topography}

Sunday brain clutter

I went into my classroom for the first official time since I got the job. A big geometric room, with yellow paint and fairly new rugs. It’s still waiting for summer cleaning though, so other than sitting in the middle of it to draw a quick floor plan on the back of a used piece of printer paper, I didn’t stay. I’ll be there enough once it’s waxed and scrubbed, arranging chairs and labeling things. Instead, I went shopping.

There is a whole slew of outlet stores right down the road from my school, and I’ve been dying to go, but have never had both hands free. That is probably one of the greatest things I miss about my pre-baby life: both hands. Now it’s a rare occasion when I’m not schlepping Bean and/or his stroller/diaper bag, or some other baby related accoutrement. But today it was just me and my blue bag.

I discovered something depressing while shopping. Something I’ve kindof been made aware of, but have been ignoring: my boobs have shrunk. Yeah, I’m stepping this low. A boob post. But I’m a WOMAN, after all, and women are aloud to whimper and whine about such things—especially after my negligee drawer has only seen D cups for the past year. I’m now in what might be called the “nearly B” category. Did you even know there was such a category? Google it. You’ll see. There is, and I’m in it. I drowned my sorrows by spending a small fortune on glorious midnight blue on-sale bath towels, and savoring more of this wine (it’s cheap, and luscious: a bouquet of blackberries, and a sweet finish.)

Doing

1) Grinning because it’s a perfect 70 degrees and sunny today, with no haze. The mountains seem close enough to touch—like perfect cardboard cut-outs on the set of a play.
2) Planning to make kebabs, red wine & peaches and ice cream for dinner with friends tonight. I’m into cooking lately. Trying new spices (juniper berries & star anise), and loving blush wine (how can anyone not love something that color?)
3) Tiling (finally!) our backsplash with lovely white handmade tiles. A zillion special cuts, cement on my cut-off jeans, and we’re one step closer to having a finished house.
4) Wincing when I smile because Bean wacked me in the eye brow with DH’s watch this morning. Ow. He thought it was FUNNY when I started to cry. Grr.

So much goodness

Sweet cantaloupe for breakfast, like golden crescent moons on our plates, and tonight a dinner party with our neighbors. Red wine by the glass full, thai noodles, chicken grilled to perfection. Laughter and unexpected ease. Our neighbors are amazing people. The kind of people I always wished I had as neighbors, but never believed really existed. The kind who say: come over to my house any time, grab a beer if I’m not there or borrow my tractor. The kind who are professional chocolatiers (no kidding, they make amazing tuffles and live just down the road), mechanics, doctors, and athletes, who sit us down and tell us where the local swimming holes are, who to call to get our brush cleared, or how to handle the local skunks (walk right by them, pretending they don’t exist & they won’t spray.) The kind who make authentic German strudel, or go for 25 mile ‘casual’ Sunday bike rides. Yeah. That kind. How did we get this lucky?

Photo Friday: Portrait

Reaching

Tonight the room is supple with heat. On the kitchen counter, new red potatoes, yellow tomatoes, and a half-drunk bottle of bully hill wine—red and sweet. Outside, the dark ink of night pools up against window panes.

Since we moved to this hilltop, wild with poplar saplings and clover, I find myself thinking often of my dad, though rarely in the way I used to do—remembering small fragments of the life I knew with him at its center. Now it is almost as though I’m catching glimpses of him right here beside Bean and me, as we ramble about the yard, walking with tall sticks, or finding small fossils. And as if they were some ethereal proof of this, dragon flies and butterflies as wide-winged as the palm of my hand, often follow us about, or settle near us on windy stems of grass.

It seems as though moving here, I’ve inadvertently moved beyond the bitter sweet of remembering—to some place that follows the improbable zig zag flight of finches towards the future.

I stumble over my thoughts tonight, wanting like I always do, to reach out and touch what the experience of loosing my father was, and never grasping more than empty air. As though the experience were a foreign film that I’ve watched a hundred times, and still the crux of the story remains a mystery: lost in translation between what the living mind can know and the spirit mind cannot say. He died four years ago, yesterday.

Outside moths with wings like frothy chocolate beat against the screen, trying to touch the light. Sometimes I’m angered by them: their innate stupidity sends them again and again up against the scorching heat of a flame or bulb, and in the morning I find their delicate corpses scattered on the sill. Other times I understand them utterly: that fierce longing to know what exists just beyond the grasp of all things knowable. In a way I am like them, throwing myself again and again at the mystery of death, trying to reach out and touch the light on the other side.

Self portrait as: trying to get the balance right

The morning after our fight feels exactly the way it does when you walk outside after a rainstorm: everything is washed clean, and light refracts from a thousand small droplets of water.

He looks different to me: maybe more like the person he really is. And as I watch him making coffee, I see that this is what marriage is: a process of holding the mirror up again and again for each other, so that we may see ourselves anew—and also, so that we may be seen anew. It takes both: to see, and to be seen, to become truly aware of ourselves—and despite the hurt of it, this is what we offer each other in the moments when we hurl words about in the narrow place of our anger.

I catch myself sucking in air, realizing that no matter how long we’ve known each other, I’ll only know a small sliver of who he is. This is why I’m grateful for our moments of tension—because they force something deeper to open, and for a brief moment I catch a glimpse of the him that’s bigger than the picture I already have.

It is so easy to grow accustomed to seeing only the part of him that is us. The person that picks up where I leave off, emptying the dishwasher, sautéing zucchini, running Bean’s bath, or the other myriad things we do together every day. Easier still to see him for the things he doesn’t do—the small, banal things that don’t really matter at all, that my mind alights on like a hungry vulture after a day spent giving, without time to myself.

Today I lie in the tall grass on the hill behind our house, all alone. The green is so vibrant here it almost sings: the foliage is such a riot of emerald hues, dense with insects and ruffled in the wind. I close my eyes and let go, feeling the earth spin.

I feel my cells drinking this solitude, replenishing the part of me that has grown sparse in the past few months, when every moment was jam-packed with responsibility for things that had very much to do with us, but never to do with simply me. I know he feels this too, this fierce need for time spent all alone doing things according to pure selfish whimsy. We both thirst for it, just as we thirst for each other, and this is the push-pull I think we’ll always feel. A struggle to find the balance between our separate selves, and the self that is sum of our love.

Without directions

We sit in the walk-in closet amid the silent heat of boxes and winter garments, and our words fly around us like an angry swarm of bees. Here, everything requires translation but the lexicons are burning.

What do we do here? In this place where both of us feel like we’ve reached the outer boundaries of love—when really the only boundary we’ve reached is the perimeter of our own large egos. The tool box is locked, and the delicate wrenches of kindness are inside.

In our culture it’s easy to interpret “successful relationship” to mean “effortless.” Friction doesn’t fit the definition we’re so often fed: the quick Hollywood snapshots of couples walking hand in hand, laughter always on the lips. Hurt—-that parabola formed at the intersection of anger and loneliness and loss—does not belong to the stereotypical shape of affection. And yet we find it here, close to us, filling the space between us, even though we are in love.

We feel terror seeping in, the moment we go beyond what’s comfortable. What if we can’t recover? What if the words we’re saying are really the basis of regret or unraveling? What if we can’t rebuild, continue, grow? Now in the heat and silence, there are large gaps between us as we look away, staring at the slope of the gabled eaves, the shelves organized with shoes and belts.

Why are we here? Away from everyone, this unventilated room is the only place where we can fight tonight with no one hearing. But really, why are we here, in the middle of this place, exchanging oxygen for anger? Because we are unskilled and unpracticed in this kind of action. Few share this part of the journey; when the rubble strewn mess of for-granted and regret collide.

We ache in this small space, trapped by our egos, and our inability to really reach beyond ourselves and meet the other. Shame drenches us, and makes us stubborn. In the balance of things we keep believing a loss of face is somehow greater than a loss of love.

So suddenly we’re there, at the breaking point. You’re walking away from me, too tightly wound, and I’ve given you nothing for everything you’ve tried to say. You’re starving but somehow I can’t offer you any bread of apology. I’ve taken yours and thrown it to the sparrows.

You stand to walk away, and as you do I finally break open, no longer caring about being heard or being right or being sad. The brittle shell around my heart breaks all apart and with the greatest effort I say it. Like Atlas lifting an entire world, I strain under the burden of my own weakness.

“I’m sorry,” I say, “For not giving you an inch.” Your body turns slightly, and you smile, just a little. Then we try again.

We do not know how to fight this way: one to one, face to face, navigating the battle map of our hearts, and this is our cultural loss. Personal conflict is always locked behind closed doors, a thing of shame. We’re taught never to talk about our family’s heartbreak, about the endless ways we hurt each other, and recover.

Yet all around us conflict is glorified in external ways. The media is saturated with constant acts of aggression. And we hardly stop to think about this lesson we teach our children, generation after generation. I can’t help but wonder if there isn’t a link between our failure to share the unmarked maps of our personal conflicts with our children, and our failure as a culture to live together peacefully in the world. Each generation grows up just as unskilled as the last, in matters of the heart. Each generation encountering it’s own inadequacy in understanding how the mystery of loosing and winning, of giving and receiving, of selfishness and selflessness is contained within the greater mystery of love. Could we do better than this for our children?

Everything is at stake in the moment I reach beyond the brittleness of myself. And when you turn back, that smile quivering at the very edges of your lips, we’ve made it to the other side.

But it takes both of us to move ahead. Waving a white flag of apology does nothing by itself. Too often you say those words trying to end the strife before it’s started, before we feel ourselves raw and exposed, on the operating table of each other’s mercy. Too often, you say “I’m sorry” before either of us know what we’re really talking about, before we reach what matters buried beneath what matters less. It takes great effort and great risk to keep talking beyond apology, beyond blame, beyond embitterment, without walking away.

We stay. And now at the breaking point, we hover like surgeons, over the open wound of our growing love, attempting at once to remove the malignancy and repair the damage. We are untrained and clumsy, yet our effort counts for something, and after hours of this mess, we are sitting together on the bed. Your arms are around my shoulders, my hand traveling the contour of your knee. We are through the worst of it: through the time of where transfusions were needed, where openness needs to replace bitterness, and the chances of survival depended not on how much we were willing to loose, but on how much we were willing to give.

Now I write, because writing does something alchemical to experience; transforming it from a blur of things merely felt, to something better understood. I write so that I can remember—so that we can remember; my words bearing witness to the things we hardly ever say (that hardly anyone ever says), that are, in the end, the words that matter most.

From a family of writers

You know how it is when you get an email from someone and it’s so good you can’t bear to just click ‘save’? I got one like that from my older sister last night, and I have to share. She’s a sales rep for the uber-cool new woman-specific clothing company Lole (“Live Outloud Every Day), and she’s traveling through a whole bunch of Western states showing their new fall line. 9 days on the road.

Dear Family,

I miss my husband I miss my animals and most of all I miss the green, color so achingly hummingly green it hurts my teeth to look at. Out here, it’s all brown: beautiful but brown indeed, interspersed with irrigated farms….

Good, huh? So are their clothes. I’m in love with several hoodies, and some of their pants make you look like you have the perfect ass, regardless of your actual ass. Check ‘em out.

I’m not saying

Either this gorgeous handbag is the real deal & an exquisite gift from my mother-in-law. Or, it is a knock-off that she bought on Canal street, after following a man who didn’t speak any English up seven flights of stairs to a back room in the garment district where she was locked into a room overflowing with bags, where she selected this beautiful specimen for a mere fistful of smallish bills. I’m not telling.

But I love it because it does far more than simply schlep all my stuff around: it makes my painfully boring black t-shirt and khakis fashionable, simply by being tossed over my shoulder nonchalantly. For this reason alone, I will now commence carrying it everywhere.

Didn’t think I was the type to tote Prada bag? I didn’t think so either. But then I though this might be just the thing I need to rectify my flagrantly pathetic approach to style.

I’m all about effortless fashion, people. And what could be more effortless than carrying a bag that can hold everything from diapers to lip gloss and still look divine?

Self portrait as an elephant

The giving, the always tugging, scrambling, jungle gym antics that my body has grown accustomed to, since him.

‘Here honey, you can hand mama the toilet paper, but no you can’t flush while I’m going. No, stop. Okay, four flushes is really enough.’

Banal things I never knew to cherish have become ornately choreographed two person acts.

I think of elephants, while we brush our teeth. Our arms like trunks, entwined each morning: his little hand holding my brush, while I frantically wiggle his brush around trying to get all four quadrants of his mouth before he grows board of the process entirely.

Or waking to his fierce affection: an inquisitive finger up my nose, perhaps, or a wet series of kisses planted on a partially open eye. My body is no longer really my own, though I try to claim it. My padded cup bras have returned, now that I’ve stopped nursing.

“They’re really small now, huh?” DH may have commented last night, the way one might comment on zucchinis.

I stand in front of the full length mirror looking at the geography of stretch marks, muscle and soft flab that my body has become, and feel the familiar disaffection rise like bile.

Then I try to remember: tomorrow I’ll wake, and before I’m fully conscious, my body will lift and carry me through a thousand small movements. I’ll kiss my husband, carry my son to our bed, press his tousled head to my cheek, and fend of his clobbering embrace.

Tomorrow I’ll wake, and my body, without being asked, will consent to the daily task of lifting and carrying, like an elephant bowing to permit a human so small, to clamber up onto her back.

More ’self portraits as…’ here.