Just now a cloud has pulled up
while I was talking to the Emptiness
of the Universe and my voice plugged into the waves
at the bottom of the ocean.
–Jason Shinder
It was March and the sidewalks were full of rain, when the man I was newly seeing stopped our ungainly umbrella-walk to look at some children. There was a large puddle on the cement in front of us, and these kids were playing in it—taking advantage of another crappy Ithaca day and finding in it cause for lightheartedness. X., beside me, sighed deeply and said, “I guess I’m just going to have to go through the puddle.” He was referring to the fact that officially, he was still someone else’s, and he was going to have to go through all the fallout of ending a long-term love.
He is a man I still sometimes wonder about. If I hadn’t, six months later, moved to New Mexico for grad school (where he sent cakes and other whimsical gifts to me through the mail), would we have stayed together, married? He’s long since wed someone else, and after following suit into (and in my case, out of) matrimony, I have put the question to bed. But the puddle is still there, so to speak, and I’m beginning to realize—as New Orleans evinces its painfully abundant fall beauty—that this time I really do have to go through it.
In the puddle are heartache, loss, my own ambivalence about intimacy. It holds the things those of us who can’t fall asleep do to avoid getting into bed (and also the peace that might eventually find us, given a chance)—which, for me, is mostly aimlessly surfing the web, scrolling through photos on Facebook that represent all my far-flung friends, as if the images could become less flat and distant, could accompany me in this haunted interior murk that rises up when the noise and the lights die down, when my child is asleep in her pink plastic bed and I go in to turn the AC up and look at her closed and flowering face.
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Facebook. Show all posts
Tuesday, September 28, 2010
Monday, May 31, 2010
Were we even there?
Today a high school acquaintance “friended” me on Facebook and I accepted (though, as usual with these requests, I had never spent any personal time with her in my life), then checked out her profile. The thing that struck me is hardly unique among people my age: her profile picture was of her kids, not her. On closer examination, I saw that she was there, but in the background, with only her face and a sweet, self-effacing smile showing around the bodies of the small children she crouched beside.
This morning at 5:40 AM my daughter, in the next room, began crying, as she always does but not usually this early; and I lurched out of bed to see what was going on. She requested milk in her sippy cup, and when I told her that it was still time to sleep, not eat, she insisted, “I hungry!” So I got the milk, gave it to her, and flung myself back into my bed, in anger that I could not express toward my child. I can barely remember a single day in the past 3 years when I have been able to wake up on my own, when I wanted to, instead of being interrupted out of sleep.
The dining room in my apartment is a room that is never used. It holds a little piece of my grandparents’ house, where I spent so much happy time as a child, in the form of their 50’s wooden table, chairs, sideboard, and jelly cabinet. Large, red-toned portraits of them, taken in the early 1980s, rest high up on the walls looking down at me so often—I feel—in disappointment that I have no innate abilities (or maybe willingness) to create a warm and nurturing home; to keep a relationship, a marriage, a contract, a pleasant demeanor…erect a Christmas tree, host dinners, enjoy being a member of the larger social structure. How did I get this way? Is this how I am supposed to be? Is there some model for “bohemian, neurotic, introvert parent” that is missing in our culture? Do these labels absolve anything—just because I know I have these qualities, what do I do?
And so, the picture of my high school acquaintance kneeling in a streambed with her four children and muscular husband awakened old debates in me and a yearning for that word “family,” which is so fraught that it is impossible to feel positively about it and impossible to live without what it represents.
The division I feel inside continues in my life, in which I am dating someone who, though he has a daughter, too (older than mine), does not want to be involved with my child, at least at present, or to see me as a mom. He prefers that we get together outside of our domestic situations, current and former. So while our exes babysit, he picks me up in his sporty car like I am a teenager, and we progress from restaurant, to bar, to bed, to a brief iced-coffee session in the morning, then back to our separate obligations. This world we inhabit is about romance, leisure—illusion. Because how can these things be real when they ignore huge parts of our experience and identities? And yet, what single mom would not want such a break from the rigors and disappointments of life? A chance to enjoy globes of red wine, animated discussion about art and relationships, spontaneous time together; and avoid mundane conversations about dry cleaning or potty training?
On one of our first dates, he and I went to a wilderness preserve in another part of the state. It was just before spring had begun, and the irises he was hoping to show me hadn’t bloomed yet. Instead, there were all these waving, brassy stalks where, in a month or less, the flowers would surely appear. They were dry like husks. They resembled wheat, nourishment, but also gave an impression of decay. It was a windy day, and there was something displacingly eternal—I know of no better adjectives for this—about the sound the wind made blowing these parched golden things around. It was a dry, old moan-hiss that said, the world has been here forever, and this life is just an accretion of perceptions arranged in time, not necessarily wedded to anything stable…look deeply into anything and it will blow away.
It was a second or third date. We held hands, or his arm was around me, as bundled in our coats we walked and sat and listened in the quiet, far from highways. I don’t know what he was thinking, but on top of the thrill of feeling his body in contact with mine, that newness, I felt a detached weariness, like we were each just collections of particles experiencing other collections of particles, forming them into stories and feelings. Were we really even there at all? I imagined how months before we met, that sound had been there, with only the small life—insect, fish, mold—subsisting in that mute place to witness it; and it would be there in the utter blackness that night after we left, when people in the cities and towns nearby were fashioning certainties of their plans and happiness.
This morning at 5:40 AM my daughter, in the next room, began crying, as she always does but not usually this early; and I lurched out of bed to see what was going on. She requested milk in her sippy cup, and when I told her that it was still time to sleep, not eat, she insisted, “I hungry!” So I got the milk, gave it to her, and flung myself back into my bed, in anger that I could not express toward my child. I can barely remember a single day in the past 3 years when I have been able to wake up on my own, when I wanted to, instead of being interrupted out of sleep.
The dining room in my apartment is a room that is never used. It holds a little piece of my grandparents’ house, where I spent so much happy time as a child, in the form of their 50’s wooden table, chairs, sideboard, and jelly cabinet. Large, red-toned portraits of them, taken in the early 1980s, rest high up on the walls looking down at me so often—I feel—in disappointment that I have no innate abilities (or maybe willingness) to create a warm and nurturing home; to keep a relationship, a marriage, a contract, a pleasant demeanor…erect a Christmas tree, host dinners, enjoy being a member of the larger social structure. How did I get this way? Is this how I am supposed to be? Is there some model for “bohemian, neurotic, introvert parent” that is missing in our culture? Do these labels absolve anything—just because I know I have these qualities, what do I do?
And so, the picture of my high school acquaintance kneeling in a streambed with her four children and muscular husband awakened old debates in me and a yearning for that word “family,” which is so fraught that it is impossible to feel positively about it and impossible to live without what it represents.
The division I feel inside continues in my life, in which I am dating someone who, though he has a daughter, too (older than mine), does not want to be involved with my child, at least at present, or to see me as a mom. He prefers that we get together outside of our domestic situations, current and former. So while our exes babysit, he picks me up in his sporty car like I am a teenager, and we progress from restaurant, to bar, to bed, to a brief iced-coffee session in the morning, then back to our separate obligations. This world we inhabit is about romance, leisure—illusion. Because how can these things be real when they ignore huge parts of our experience and identities? And yet, what single mom would not want such a break from the rigors and disappointments of life? A chance to enjoy globes of red wine, animated discussion about art and relationships, spontaneous time together; and avoid mundane conversations about dry cleaning or potty training?
On one of our first dates, he and I went to a wilderness preserve in another part of the state. It was just before spring had begun, and the irises he was hoping to show me hadn’t bloomed yet. Instead, there were all these waving, brassy stalks where, in a month or less, the flowers would surely appear. They were dry like husks. They resembled wheat, nourishment, but also gave an impression of decay. It was a windy day, and there was something displacingly eternal—I know of no better adjectives for this—about the sound the wind made blowing these parched golden things around. It was a dry, old moan-hiss that said, the world has been here forever, and this life is just an accretion of perceptions arranged in time, not necessarily wedded to anything stable…look deeply into anything and it will blow away.
It was a second or third date. We held hands, or his arm was around me, as bundled in our coats we walked and sat and listened in the quiet, far from highways. I don’t know what he was thinking, but on top of the thrill of feeling his body in contact with mine, that newness, I felt a detached weariness, like we were each just collections of particles experiencing other collections of particles, forming them into stories and feelings. Were we really even there at all? I imagined how months before we met, that sound had been there, with only the small life—insect, fish, mold—subsisting in that mute place to witness it; and it would be there in the utter blackness that night after we left, when people in the cities and towns nearby were fashioning certainties of their plans and happiness.
Irises at Jean Lafitte National Historic Park and Preserve
Monday, August 11, 2008
Time warp
I joined Facebook the other day, which suddenly put me in touch with people I hadn't seen or spoken to since high school or college (or shortly after college, which also seems like way long ago). Since then, I have been getting a vivid feeling of different times in my life existing simultaneously. Like, it is still 1989, my family and I just moved to Middlesex, New Jersey, where every strip mall and restaurant is new to me so I am kind of off-balance, and my mom and I are doing some boring shopping at Karin's Kurtains. I'm sulking because I hate being dragged through stores looking at curtains or bath towels and because, well, I'm 14. It's the summer before high school. Now somehow I am in my mid-thirties and some moments I can't remember anything that came between being 14 and now; it's like the 14-year-old inside me is given a preview of her life later, which is this life I am living, with a sense of "Oh, so that's how it turned out." And if somewhere I am still 14 then there are still all these other possibilities for what could have happened...except I know those possibilities are gone and I'm not going to get any younger from here on out.
At a certain point a switch happens where the future becomes less a source of joy and hope than--just the next thing, possibly a source of dread or worry (middle age, death) and the past becomes something to wallow in. There is no limit to the ways in which I can make myself feel bad for not being 17 or 24 anymore, for wasting whatever presented itself to me then; and the ways I can fear what is ahead (since in our culture, women seem to become invisible somewhere around their mid-40's unless they can afford to inject bacteria into their faces, etc. to keep themselves looking 5-10 years younger, except they don't really look younger, they just look--stretched. Like they are trying. That's what I think, and sign me up for the bacteria injection).
And yet inbetween high school and now, a lot happened and I felt all of it; it wasn't like going into suspended animation or having a dream and waking up. But increasingly it feels that way...and what is real, anyway? The dreams I brush off when I wake up every morning, don't they constitute just as much of my consciousness as whatever story I seem to be living or have lived? I don't know but sometimes I feel there is such a scary vulnerability to aging because you have to do it, to go through time, whether you want to or not and you are on a ride that you can't get off except by death.
And I guess I can't help but feel disappointed in my life now when I look at it after looking through my high school or college year books. Because I feel less fresh and attractive, that is the superficial part, and because never again will there be that sense that there was then that the story wasn't written and that everything was ahead. So no matter how miserable the young are, they know that there is a huge future waiting to be written on, so there is always a way out of whatever unhappiness.
But I don't want this to disintegrate into whining about not being "young." It is more a sense of awe that things really do end and pass. I remember sometime during the high school years, over a summer, taking a tennis clinic or class and practicing at an indoor court. For some reason I was miserable. It was a big echoey ugly building we were in with dividers separating one tennis court from the next; and maybe I wasn't doing well at my game or I didn't like the other people at the camp; I don't even know anymore. There was just an intense feeling of misery, time dragging on, of this-will-never-end, and then a sudden liberating knowledge that seemed to lift me up out of that building, that self and whole time of life, and say, No, this will end and something else will be true, you won't be 16 forever.
At a certain point a switch happens where the future becomes less a source of joy and hope than--just the next thing, possibly a source of dread or worry (middle age, death) and the past becomes something to wallow in. There is no limit to the ways in which I can make myself feel bad for not being 17 or 24 anymore, for wasting whatever presented itself to me then; and the ways I can fear what is ahead (since in our culture, women seem to become invisible somewhere around their mid-40's unless they can afford to inject bacteria into their faces, etc. to keep themselves looking 5-10 years younger, except they don't really look younger, they just look--stretched. Like they are trying. That's what I think, and sign me up for the bacteria injection).
And yet inbetween high school and now, a lot happened and I felt all of it; it wasn't like going into suspended animation or having a dream and waking up. But increasingly it feels that way...and what is real, anyway? The dreams I brush off when I wake up every morning, don't they constitute just as much of my consciousness as whatever story I seem to be living or have lived? I don't know but sometimes I feel there is such a scary vulnerability to aging because you have to do it, to go through time, whether you want to or not and you are on a ride that you can't get off except by death.
And I guess I can't help but feel disappointed in my life now when I look at it after looking through my high school or college year books. Because I feel less fresh and attractive, that is the superficial part, and because never again will there be that sense that there was then that the story wasn't written and that everything was ahead. So no matter how miserable the young are, they know that there is a huge future waiting to be written on, so there is always a way out of whatever unhappiness.
But I don't want this to disintegrate into whining about not being "young." It is more a sense of awe that things really do end and pass. I remember sometime during the high school years, over a summer, taking a tennis clinic or class and practicing at an indoor court. For some reason I was miserable. It was a big echoey ugly building we were in with dividers separating one tennis court from the next; and maybe I wasn't doing well at my game or I didn't like the other people at the camp; I don't even know anymore. There was just an intense feeling of misery, time dragging on, of this-will-never-end, and then a sudden liberating knowledge that seemed to lift me up out of that building, that self and whole time of life, and say, No, this will end and something else will be true, you won't be 16 forever.
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