Eye or I?

I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me... –Emerson

When I was 14 and spent the summer at camp in Blairstown, New Jersey, I had a couple of firsts: I finally bled (the last among my peers to do so) and had my first huge crush on a man. His name was Richard and he was 19, from London, fond of soccer and chess. I don’t know what created such combustion within me—a yearning that lasted for years. At first, he was just a cute guy my cabin-mates in our so-called “Algonquin Village” gushed about. Then, as I turned my own focus on him—because these other girls had, they must be on to something—I found him to be an excellent blank screen for projecting almost anything. He was tall, spiky-blond hair (this was 1989...), blue eyes and that accent that made wonderful things happen, as if he had melting ice cubes in his mouth so that everything he said was cool and without edges. And, God bless him, he was mostly quiet. So I had no real idea about his personality, opinions, etc. and could imagine all the best, imagine he secretly noticed me, too despite the fact that he was dating a girl his age who worked in the dining hall (my friends and I, envious, called her the “Kitch Bitch”). There was also the strong taboo element: others in whom I confided about my crush told me he would be arrested if he even laid a finger on me—which, duh, wasn’t exactly off-putting. When I left camp at the end of the summer, dragged away in my parents’ Volvo, I missed him—whose longest sentence to me had been, “You don’t have to pick those chips up, they’re biodegradable” (in that accent)—for months, for years.

That was the time, the moment, when my focus definitively changed from me looking out at the world, to me seeing everything through the Other as I imagined this Other looking at me, through me. (I am reminded of philosopher Simone Weil’s idea that God, who is referred to as male, can only love her as the space in Creation that she takes up; the more fully she submits or removes herself, the more God can fill and possess the space she leaves behind.)

…I was wearing a long tie-dyed t-shirt over my bathing suit, floating on an inner tube down the Delaware along with Richard, another counselor called Sarge, and a handful of kids, all of whom were somewhere in my line of sight but not nearby; when in a moment that seemed to magnify into a revelation, a shift, a bolt of knowledge or love, I saw everything around me—the swirling water, my bare legs and feet, trees rising up on the shore, the vivid Pennsylvania summer sky—imbued with significance and specialness as if I was not alone, as if Richard were inside my gaze, like I was imagining being him, almost, or feeling him finding my perspective fascinating and larger-than-life. This is how falling in love made me feel (and has): it replaced my “I” with the eye of the beloved in an ecstatic act of subjection, a hyper-aware openness.

How can I relish life with just my own eyes (and “I”), my own days, “reality” that feels like a ribbon ironed flat?

This is larger than a self-esteem issue, although that is involved. It’s why I write—as an act of reflection, to give the world to myself as if from outside, so I can feel the space that I, too, take up.

Single

The last time I saw my recent ex was on a hot August night when I visited his workplace. Nursing several glasses of wine, I had a long conversation with a woman a few years younger than me who bartends there. She had intentionally taken a significant amount of time away from romantic relationships to focus on herself. In that time she had done a cleanse, yoga, and a lot of reflecting, and is also training to become an alternative healer. Glowing with health and beauty, she concluded her description of her ongoing “single” experience by saying, in a tone of evident satisfaction: “My head is so quiet now.” My response was jealousy, for my head was not quiet. My head was like a 4 AM party that needs to be broken up by police or concerned neighbors. Even as I registered my response to this woman’s words—and her state of secure wellbeing—I could feel the howling wolves and broken glass of my inner hysteria…which, a couple of hours later, prompted me to initiate the end of that romantic relationship.

Now, about a month post- this latest breakup, I realize that I have either been in love with or dating someone since I was 18; almost half my life. What would it be like if the psychic energy I have been channeling toward men were poured back into me and my life? I also realize that to be a 35-year-old unemployed single mother is a horrible cliché. Around me, everyone I know has paired up. They have built or bought enduring structures. They appear able to, in the lingo of my Counseling studies, “form and maintain satisfying relationships,” both intimate and communal. Since about 18, non-sexual relationships have interested me very little: something that becomes clear whenever there is a holiday and I have no plans; that was apparent last month on my birthday when I did not receive a gift. How can I advise other people on how to succeed in relationships—of all kinds—until I can define what such success means to me?

I do not want to be judgmental here about my (or anyone’s) strong drive for love and sex. Trying to scrub these parts of me away or condescend to them would mean harming myself…which is exactly what I want to stop doing. I just want to press pause and see how I arrived at this state of things.

I am reminded of the end of the Jane Kenyon poem “Eating the Cookies,” which is about cleaning out the house after a close relative has died: the speaker pauses in her packing/folding and, for a moment, presses the last cookie from the tin against her forehead, “because / it seemed like the next thing to do.”

A Transparent Life

When asked if I plan to have a second child, my answer is an immediate NO! as if I have been asked, instead, to debone a whole fish. (As Sara nears school-age, I have been delighted to get sleep, poetry, and other kinds of freedom back.) But there is another urge that has been growing in me for years: to join so many Americans in the strange act of writing a memoir.

Memoirs, in my understanding, used to be something you wrote when you were older or had experienced something catastrophic. Now, the field has been opened up and it seems that anyone, no matter how young or inexperienced, can write a memoir about anything. My creative inspiration has always been experience, and the only experiences I feel confident about recording are my own. Anais Nin wrote, “We write to taste life twice,” and I think there are some of us who have that taste—for whom living once isn’t enough. To have an experience, good or even awful, is one pleasure; to recreate past worlds of sensation and feeling is another that suggests a further pleasure of opening the vault of private experience to a wider world (why I blog): making private life into public record. Clearly, some people would rather be shot in the face than do this, but I have had an exhibitionist streak since the times when, during naptime in kindergarten, I would cross to the boys’ side of the room and flash them (who suggested this—them or me—is unclear).

I have read many memoirs this year as I’ve turned this wish over in my mind. Some were beautifully written—like Mary Karr’s Lit—some were about some combination of food, romance, and France; or, extending this further, butchery and infidelity (I really like, and was slightly embarrassed by, Julie Powell’s second book). Some also served as a self-help manual for the reader, teaching by example; maybe all, since another person’s story can always be internalized. Some I’ve read and thought, I can definitely write a better book than this person. But when it comes to it, I can never commit to a topic (depression? motherhood? marriage/divorce?) and get started. Maybe underneath, there is some conviction that I don’t dare speak about my little experiences; that I have nothing valuable to say to people.

During my senior year of college, I worked as an artist’s model. Once a week, myself and several forty-somethings met at a beautiful little house out in the country—lots of warm wood and glass doors, a transparent kind of house—and ate avocado salad and plates of rotini, sometimes proceeding to the outdoor hottub with our wineglasses and sharing a joint. Then, off would come my robe and I stood (or sat, knelt, or lay) among some white pillows in the center of the basement room under a spotlight. I did this, for something like $20 a session, because I thought it was a cool thing to do and because it scared the hell out of me. As a result, I did not create the best or most graceful poses. I think I looked rather stiff and awkward and, as one (male) artist remarked, I appeared skinnier when wearing my clothes. My nipples, as another person despaired, kept changing size due to uneven heating of the room (this was winter in upstate NY). In other words, I was completely under scrutiny: more than physically, it felt like. Because I believed the body—my own not-so-skinny 21-year-old body—to be the gateway to love, to being known as a person by another person. This was something I could barely conceive of at the time, since I’d had very few lovers and was about 10 years away from discovering the clitoris and any sense of ease during physical intimacy. But to reveal oneself, I learned, is an opportunity, opening one up to criticism, joy, and the complexity of things.

Self-disclosure, whose different forms I’ve pursued ever since, has never brought happiness—for long. But it has occasioned knowledge and, as my friend recently wrote in an email reflecting on my (transparently) messy life, knowledge is the most faithful of lovers.

Coming Home

My daughter returns from her month-long stay with my mom in the Northeast on Tuesday—and I can’t wait. It was a strange period of “vacation” time without her. I was laid off from my job, fired by my boyfriend, and enjoyed considerably more alone time, and 30 Rock episodes, than one person should have to withstand. (Liz Lemon, I am you!...) I also slept really late a few times and was accepted into Loyola’s graduate Counseling program, so it wasn’t all bad. Overall, though, the feelings I routinely experienced during this time make me think of a practice that my stepfather used to indulge in: walking across hot coals barefoot while chanting cool moss…cool moss…

Today I bought a cute tablecloth so we can eat meals, which I will theoretically make instead of microwaving, at the dining room table (not in front of the TV/at the computer, as was the custom before she left). With the crystal candlesticks from my dad’s parents’, the table I have been hauling from place to place for years—and have egregiously under-utilized—suddenly looks warm and sweet…and I realize that the one thing I need in my life right now is some kind of domestic happiness. I want to embrace the love I have in my life, with my child, and be able to really feel and give love (the real and nurturing kind, not the kind that steals from you and makes you less-than), in my body and in the space I create around me. This has always been the thing it is hardest for me to do; and I wonder why.

I keep trying to find a copy of the Laurie Colwin novel Family Happiness at used bookstores because I want to reread it. It’s about a woman who is split between her family, with whom she has a happy and secure connection, and her extramarital lover, who “gets” her like no one else; and chooses, in the end, to stay on both paths without ever having the two meet. Colwin’s writing is existentially comforting, nuanced, and buoyant and I need that now. I don’t think, though, I will be following the path(s) chosen by Polly Solo-Miller, the main character in the book. I want those two things together: a love, and home. Is it possible? I am going to hope. In the meantime, there is just a tablecloth. And three placemats.

Untying the Knot

For years, I’ve been wondering what to do with my wedding rings: two simple white-gold bands, the engagement ring featuring a pink tourmaline surrounded by two tiny diamonds. During the two-year separation, I occasionally brought them out of their black box in the bathroom closet and wore them (usually while cleaning, for some reason) to give myself a jolt of weird security. Their existence suggested I had once had things figured out: there had been a man, a cat, a rented house, and dinner to come home to, followed by Law and Order reruns. At the same time they were a reminder that I had failed to fulfill their promise. I had loved and, like so many others, lost, leading to a division of zero assets and the temporary moniker of “defendant.” Once in a while I would actively consider parting with them, especially after my ex remarried two summers ago, pushing our unsuccessful union further into the zone of irretrievability. But I felt paralyzed by indecision. Pawning them seemed so crass. Better to keep them—out of sight, out of mind?—or, someday, do something meaningful and ceremonial like toss them over a waterfall, experiencing a cathartic sense of release.

In the end I sold them, today, to pay my energy bill. The transaction was held at a cardboard box-cluttered jewelry store in a strip mall in the suburbs. The buyer—a guy with the same first name as my ex-spouse, which seemed poetic—dropped them in a plastic Krewe of Rex cup intended for beer conveyance during Mardi Gras; weighed their slight physical presence; and wrote down an amount that almost covers one month of AC use in New Orleans. Goodbye…

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.

 

Irises at Jean Lafitte National Historic Park and Preserve

I love...oops

Last night I spontaneously declared my affections to my boyfriend in the traditional style: in which, after weeks of unconscious deliberation, one stares into the face of the beloved and deploys the word love, hoping that it may be said back or at least, that one won’t be ejected from the beloved’s lap. Similarly to when I said I’m pregnant to someone else 4 years ago, it did not go well.

After the stunned silence and polite, non-I-love-you- infused reply from him, he asked if I would like some water (we had been finishing dinner) and went to get it from the other room, probably doing his best to restrain himself from leaving the apartment and from there, the country. I felt as if my insides were coated in tar, or that I should request my water with a side of arsenic. In short, I sort of extremely wished I could take it back. Now my miscalculation is sitting in the middle of my life, both of our lives, like a poop in a hotel sink. If the relationship does end it will be the first time, in my experience, that I love you has been the cause.

Afterwards, we failed to fuck. Nothing puts a damper on sex like saying those words to a man who is not desirous of hearing them; or at least, hearing them from you.

And today, some decision must be made. Do I take the email he wrote this morning—in which he spoke of his love for his recent ex, relief in finally being over her, and weary repulsion, now, for all things love—as a final end or a post-I love you male freakout? I think any self-respecting woman would end things with him, but self-respect has not been my thing. A trail of past missteps and humiliation had led me—over a candlelit dinner in his bedroom; after being referred to by him as his “girlfriend” multiple times; after 3 months of amazing sex, planning a vacation together this summer, and several calls/texts throughout each day—to tell my lover that I love him. Big mistake.