Seeking home

The ideogram portrays a heart and a boat between two shores, enduring in the voyage of life.- from the I Ching Ideogram 32, “Persevering”

Almost 7 years ago when I left my husband, moving 1,000 miles north with no job or friends waiting, I had come to a few conclusions about myself. That I am a person who probably shouldn’t be married, but should have a series of passionate flings like Anaïs Nin (though she was, uh, also married); that I am too restless and curious to be satisfied by one person forever; that I would prefer to provide security for myself, and find excitement through my relationships.

The conclusions I drew then turned into a reality that, at this point, I long to escape. But I don’t know how.

This is from a journal entry written when I was soon to move away from the house we shared in Auburn, Alabama:

I feel very sad at the prospect of leaving this street, which I love. It is lush & chirping. The crape myrtle is blooming all over town and outside my office window. After 2 yrs of hating this place I have to admit I’ve become attached to it. This street is so quiet & peaceful—it’s been a haven and a retreat. I feel grounded here—God, I have spent so much time in this house, on this street, it’s like I’ve put down roots. Even though I spent so much time looking out the window at the neighbor’s blue mailbox with the weeds or swamp grass or whatever growing around it. I like Victor’s yard & the mysterious gate—like something in the English countryside—that leads into his backyard and which I’ve never seen beyond. The stump in the across-the-street neighbor’s yard from where a hurricane knocked their tree down. The stump always makes me sad because the tree protected their house from view, it’s so naked over there now. I’ll miss the porch & sitting with Gretel [my cat] in the sunlight, & the Pin Oak in our front yard, which I thought for a while was dead but then one day was full of little leaves. I’ll miss the nighttime insect sounds which I hear right now. And all the birds—birds love our crape myrtle & I would always see cardinals hopping in its branches and hear birdsong all day. & watching the bushes in our front yard grow and how they get tall & unruly & give us more privacy behind them. & the curve of our street and the neighbor’s chalked-in basketball court, how he put a basketball court right in the middle of the street & he’s always out there with his dog and little boy & he acknowledges me with a wave and a look when I drive by & sometimes his boy does, too.

I concluded, These things didn’t make me happy, but they were there for me, they accepted me into them, they did no harm.

So what would make me happy? This is what I thought, then:

I want to be on a date with someone I’m wildly attracted to. To stay up all night with someone—to have that intimacy & specialness. To have extreme and intense experiences of aliveness (not extreme like bungee jumping). I want to be buzzed & laughing at a dinner with friends. I want to go dancing to 80s music. I want to go camping and talk around a fire, and drink. I want to make love so intensely I feel the whole universe coming into it and lose all self-consciousness. I want to scream. I want to have FUN.

Well, I can honestly say that I’ve experienced those things since. Except the camping. And even my most ecstatic moments are tinged with self-consciousness...but a lot less than before.

After I announced who I thought I was, and left—a conversation which happened the day after I’d graduated with my MFA, with trees outside our dining room window thrashing in a tropical storm-grade wind—I missed my ex-husband for years. And sometimes still do. Not just the things we did together habitually, like making Indian food or traveling the country by car—but his presence as a person. His light-blue eyes, and the care he took parting his hair after showering; the piercing way he looked at me when I was upset and sulking, like he was frustrated but wasn’t going anywhere.

…I do think C was right in saying that I’m too young, didn’t know what I want, need to have more experiences. He said he wants someone who’ll be there at his deathbed. I said, “I just want to feel alive.”

Oh, maybe I should see the past 7 years as a success. Instead of thinking words like lonely, grief, failure, unstable, scary, I should think, ALIVE!

...Four years ago, my ex remarried and now has two sons with his wife, another poet like him. I’m not even a poet anymore or at least, not a practicing one. Despite my having put years into the MFA, I am not writing poems, not sending any out. I’m a stressed single parent; I've been dating someone for two months, so things are uncertain in a way I've become accustomed to.

I’m training as a mental health counselor to spend my days listening to others’ stories of brokenness, which reflect my own. That role and being mother to my 4-year-old offer me glimpses of the stability I’ve lost in the vicissitudes of romantic relationship.

And yet I feel pretty damn sure I want what my ex-husband offered me, too early in my adulthood for me to accept it—that secure love which, now that I feel I’m being denied it, looks like the only path toward wholeness.

 

C. and I at my MFA graduation ceremony

The waiting

I made fun of online dating on this blog (http://fallingovergirl.blogspot.com/2010_02_01_archive.html) a while back. But now I’ve decided to try it, using a free site. Some thoughts a few days in:

1. As in life, the men I like and those who like me are two different categories.

2. Being a 36-year-old baby mama does not make me part of the most popular demographic in men’s eyes.

3. I seem to fare better in bars, where my age and parental status are not immediately apparent. Online, it's like they are written on big signs that people see before they register anything else.

4. But I have to try it because all the couples I know met online.

5. Because relationships that start in bars are unlikely to lead to feeling loved.

6. And Christmas break is coming up—the time when my grad-school friends leave town. Might as well go out with strangers so as not to asphyxiate of boredom.

7. Dating sites subject you to a lot of junk-email from folks who CANNOT SPELL OR USE GRAMMAR.

8. Yet they also increase your odds of having an important encounter with someone you wouldn’t have met otherwise.

9. If love is a hotel, online dating is like the hallway. As you walk through, checking out the people passing by or beckoning you toward slightly-open doors, you think: “In the past, I have always just rushed into a room in this hotel. And then I woke up 12 hours later, bruised, robbed, and with no real idea what happened...”

10. It would take only one really good date to make this worthwhile.

And this, from T.S. Eliot (in “East Coker” from Four Quartets):

“I said to my soul, be still, and wait without hope
For hope would be hope for the wrong thing; wait without love,
For love would be love of the wrong thing; there is yet faith
But the faith and the love and the hope are all in the waiting.”

Passport

Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life? -Mary Oliver

Recently I got several boxes in the mail from my mother, mostly full of stuff from my daughter’s 4th birthday party over the summer. It was like Christmas for Sara as I opened each box, and toys emerged that she thought she had lost or maybe dreamed of—a mermaid doll that changes colors in the tub, Buzz Lightyear, a few plastic Smurfs (which she calls “Smurths”).

My mom also sent along a surprising item: my passport, not used since I lived in London for three months on study abroad. The photo was taken when I was 16, and I always thought it was awful. In it I sport a puffy, shoulder-length perm,un-groomed eyebrows, braces, and no makeup. But now, I see something different—for instance, someone who could go without makeup and still look OK. But the picture doesn’t matter.

See, I have a flying phobia—circa post-9/11. And I have “had” depression circa way before that. More than the fear of airplanes or terrorists, depression has kept me far from the world I began to explore in high school and college; from connecting to other places and people outside my own sadness. And yet the stamps on my passport remind me that I was once in Vaduz, Lichtenstein (where I remember climbing many stairs to the top of an old Olympic ski slope); Heathrow and Gatwick airports; Greece; and back in New York City on November 30, 1995, when I returned from my months in England. I had also visited Ireland, Scotland, Italy, Germany, Austria, Switzerland, and a tiny, ancient part of Turkey, where I bought a little souvenir keychain: a brass figurine of a man with a disproportionately large, erect penis, some kind of fertility symbol. But I wouldn’t say my life after that was very fertile.

Depression creates an inner, and eventually outer, landscape inhospitable to life. Basically, in this state of mind it’s like there is an immovable obstacle between me and anything I might want or need to do, whether it’s to take a walk at the park, play with my child, do homework (I’m a grad student), make plans for the weekend, work a job, write a poem, cope with normal feelings of sadness, anger, and anxiety, or even open my mail. And the most frustrating or debilitating thing is that no one else sees that I have an illness that is walking and talking for me; not even me. Instead, I beat myself up for my lack of motivation, my inability to do this or that.

A couple months ago, I had a vast realization—this is really how it felt—that this identity, of being a depressed person, actually doesn’t have to be permanent. I am 36. And I have struggled through depressive episodes for 18 years now, since my grandfather died of lung cancer during my second week of college. But what if in the next parts of my life, I am going to be an essentially different person: one who isn’t depressed? I was walking in my neighborhood when I first had this astounding thought...It had been a bad weekend. The previous day, I’d spent all afternoon lying in bed. That was Sunday, and my daughter kept wandering in from where she was playing in her adjacent bedroom, probably wondering what was going on with me. As I walked over the broken, tilted old sidewalks I thought about the kind of parent I want to be: one who is not one day remembered by her child as having spent days in bed. I suddenly conceived of the depression as a separate thing—as not really “me,” but as something else that had been added and could be un-added.

At this point on my walk, I noticed a house that I have passed many times since I moved to this neighborhood two years ago. Whenever I’d previously seen it, the house—white, two-story, over a century old, with a dark-blue mansard roof—was under renovation. There was a dumpster out front full of materials being discarded in the process. (This is a common sight on the streets of New Orleans.) The house, I now saw, was done; the dumpster was gone. I could see into the row of tall front windows, made of wavy old glass, into a spacious room whose walls had been painted a delicate, vibrant shade of yellow similar to egg yolk. It looked like no one was living there yet. For some reason that glimpse of color through the glass moved me, and tears came to my eyes. The empty yellow room was somehow my hope of not being depressed—what it would look like. Bright, and lively…I could move into that, and there could be a whole new life. And then, because I didn’t want anyone to notice me staring at this house like someone with mental problems, I walked past, but glanced back a couple times to re-experience that flash of feeling.

When I opened my passport for the first time in so many years and looked at my 16-year-old face in all its awkwardness, and the dark stamps on the blue pages, I was again moved. It struck me as an invitation that had arrived at just the right time: to explore this earth, live in this world and be at ease in my skin. Though I may have to update the photo.

Falling up

I am not sure how to write about my feelings for New Orleans. So many people have; it’s almost a cliché. But though my emerging attachment to this place is hardly unique, it is real and mysterious enough for me to want to share.

Before becoming a NOLA transplant, I spent 7 years in Ithaca, New York--not a place I was lukewarm about. During several years away, living in New Mexico, Virginia, and Alabama, it haunted me. There is a joke that because Ithaca is in a valley, it boasts a gravity that sucks people back in. In my house in Alabama where, as a poetry grad student, I spent most of each day writing, I had daydreamed of Ithaca: the lake with different colors of ice; waterfalls gushing each spring; the tidy grid of streets, yards messy with flowers; the high likelihood of glimpsing Tibetan Buddhist monks around in red and orange robes. During my last stint in I-town (as it is called), I often walked with Sara in her stroller along Cascadilla Creek. Watching the ducks or geese drifting by, and dreadlocked youths streaming in and out of Gimme Coffee across from a pretty park, I felt I was in a paradise of beauty and simplicity.

When it was time to leave, I did not want to go. Like, at all. I envisioned myself buying one of the Victorians in the coveted Fall Creek neighborhood and settling in. At the time I could have done so (probably a ranch, not a Victorian) thanks to an inheritance from my grandmother. I had a support network of friends and my mom 3 hours away to help with Sara; she and I lived in a spacious apartment in one of the downtown’s “high-rise” buildings (i.e., it had 5 floors) where there was a balcony from which we could see the whole city and surrounding farmland. Packing up in July 2009, I felt a huge ache.

At the time, my then-boyfriend and child’s father was heading to Tulane Law. Things between us were tenuous. If he left and I stayed, I felt, I would always wonder if I could have made it work, and would bear the responsibility of depriving my child of a day-to-day relationship with her dad. It was a natural time for me to think of leaving, too, since I craved a change in my career situation and—laughably—thought New Orleans would have more, not fewer, opportunities. Delusion is probably a big reason why anyone does anything in life.

But in the end, I moved because of a dream. I am not a religious person except when it comes to Mary of Guadalupe, whose images/statuettes have taken over my décor in the past ten years. So I prayed for an answer—stay or face an uncertain move—requesting that Mary’s response be as immediate and unambiguous as possible. That night, I dreamed that my boyfriend and I were in a boat together suspended in the sky over New Orleans. He skillfully guided the boat down to land on Lake Pontchartrain. It was like a precognitive dream for dummies.

The first months in New Orleans, though, were reminiscent of Biblical plagues rather than an affirmation of my divinely-guided choice. Car break-in and GPS theft were followed by months of scabies (if you don’t know what that is…good). The almost-immediate breakup with my boyfriend segued to 10 days of homelessness when the energy company killed the power at my new apartment. That October I somehow found myself on 3 leases at once, with no job; subsequently, over 6 months and with a Master’s, I could not land even one interview (eventually securing a temp position with the Census).

Yet New Orleans gave me things I didn’t even know I was missing. Ripe citrus on trees in November; king cake; the St. Charles streetcar lit up at night, full of tourists eager to abandon themselves to this place of muscular oaks and joyous funerals and decadent cuisine. Several friends I know of were arrested here in their youth, because it’s that kind of place where you do things to excess. When you lose, you lose big, and when you receive, you have more than your arms can hold.

Like any experience of love, my love for this city has been complicated. I resent the insufficient drainage system that causes water to gush up onto my lawn almost every time it rains; and I was exalted after the Superbowl win when people in the Carrollton neighborhood (where I watched the game) stopped their cars in the middle of the road, jumped out, and hugged strangers. Due to the endless summers, everyone always seems to be partying like it’s prom night or New Years, so there is pressure to make every day and night a tremendous event: to be, as one of my Counseling classmates labels it, a “fun-seeker.” If you feel isolated in such an atmosphere there is not much support, and it can be challenging to break into groups that have been established for years among locals.

Last Friday, I witnessed a brass band playing outside near Frenchmen Street, the bohemian hub of New Orleans nightlife. Watching the musicians, I didn’t want to stand still, and I could feel that happy energy in the crowd of strangers around me. Wanting to dance in a crowd outside is what this city is about. It is also about yellow-tape crime scenes and poor neighborhoods lacking any trees to shelter residents from the brutal months of heat, the monsoon-like rains. There is no illusion of anything being egalitarian or offered easily. When you can’t get a job in your field, your water is shut off due to a bureaucratic misunderstanding, and you are part of the massive population on Medicaid, there is a sense of living close to the fundamentals of life, having to discern and love what is of greatest value.

And I try to. I love that my daughter is growing up here, that—in contrast to my early, homogenous environment in the North—she is among kids of diverse backgrounds at daycare. I am excited that she will be able to claim this place, with its unique resemblance of European and Caribbean cities, as part of her identity. She won’t have to mumble, “I’m from…Jersey,” as I do every time someone asks my origins. Growing up in New Orleans will give Sara years of conversation at parties, at the very least.

As for me, what this place will provide in the final analysis (as my grandmother used to say) is a mystery. I have experienced its chaos and my own insecurity, felt keenly the Otherness that excludes and attracts me. Here, I am invited to be stronger than I have ever been rather than remaining a person who is self-characterized as “Falling Over” (the previous name of this blog). It is easy to fall: fall in love, fall apart. It’s a matter of gravity and of old patterns. It is harder, and richer, to rise.

The End of the Innocence

One of my classmates did a cool thing the other day: brought a small, flowering branch to our Research and Statistics class. It was from a local bush called Sweet Olive which, he told a couple of us during lunch, blooms during sudden changes in temperature. He said the smell, more intensely than any other sensory data, brings back a childhood of happy time spent outside. That reminded me of Proust’s madeleine—the capacity of scent (and for me, music) not just to evoke, but almost to conjure or reinstate the past. This is why I could never really get into Buddhism; because I find the past to be one of the best things in life. Why try to detach from it? Why not just wallow in it?

I remember returning from class one gloomy October day during my sophomore year of college to find my suitemate, Dawn, sitting alone in the dark, listening to music and weeping. I hope it doesn’t ruin this if I say, the music might have been Journey. I must have attempted to console her; she tried to explain to me that one day, I would understand and even welcome the pleasures of melancholy. I think I may have since taken her message a little too far. She also suggested that I would not always feel the need to hide my long brown hair under a hat—which I did for roughly 3 years of college, either a baseball cap or the soft, velvety winter hat given to me by my grandmother, the queen of hats. She was right about that, too. I probably could have learned more from her; but in her wisdom she soon transferred from Colgate to a much more liberal school in Massachusetts, where people probably understood such things automatically.

Anyway, in the car this morning on the way home from Sara’s daycare—where, when I lingered too long, my child ordered me to “leave, mom!” in a tone that made me flash ahead to her teen years—I heard a Don Henley song on the radio that catapulted me back. I somehow drove home but I was not really aware of my current surroundings. Instead, I was in the summer of 1994 when the man I was in love with (my first requited love, which is a powerful thing) had made me a mix-tape—to take the sting out of the fact that he was spending the summer after our Freshman year strolling around Princeton with his long-term girlfriend, and I was spending it working at Drug Fair and DJ’s Fast Pizza, as well as cleaning the 4 litter boxes in my parents’ basement. (I remember counting down—only 64 more litter boxes before I go back to school...) On lunch breaks from Drug Fair, I sat on the bleachers behind the middle school with my Walkman and listened to the tape, which had on it Henley’s “The End of the Innocence”; “Nights in White Satin” ('Cos I love you, yes I love you, oh how I love you); Simon and Garfunkel’s suicide-inducing “Scarborough Fair”; and the REM song with the refrain I’m SOORREEE… Oh, the drama. I sat out there crying, my headphones sealing me into a private world in which I was the star—not a minor player relegated to ringing up people’s cigarette purchases or sneezing over cat litter boxes. The songs he gave me, while they did not help me to stop imagining him in bed with her, did help restore me to myself, and that was quite a gift.

Hearing that song today, I felt some tears for him (who I am still in touch with, of course, on Facebook); tears I had thought, 16 or so years ago, would never stop. But they did. And that is the real “end of the innocence”: to become aware that it all passes; a well that seemed inexhaustible goes dry. I used to think love meant marriage and a future. Now I know that if love comes into my life, I can’t assume I know what it means. I should just be thankful for its fleeting presence and the enduring sensory traces it leaves behind, the being happy inside the being sad.

Life as a pair of pants

My friend Elizabeth told me about a study showing that things which annoy you on a daily basis can cause more mental harm, over time, than larger events such as divorce or job loss. The researchers’ finding was that if a minor annoyance—the broken fridge door, the tree in the yard that blocks light and generates a litter of needles, the paint flaking off the ceiling—is not dealt with, it spreads like a stain, causing mental anguish and slow physical decline. Well, for the past five years, my pants won’t stay up. Maybe this explains…a lot about my recent life.

Let me start at the beginning, during the time when my pants sat cozily at my expanding waist: marriage. Living in small-town Alabama with no access to decent restaurants, my spouse and I cooked pasta, filled our recycling bin with wine bottles, and ate cheese. A lot. I gained 15 pounds, he gained 20, and I hadn’t got the memo telling women that to be fashionable, jeans were now supposed to reveal the butterfly tattoo flowing out of their ass crack. Not only did my jeans button way high up, they were baggy, tenting out around the crotch like those worn on the Northeastern college campuses of my early-1990s youth. I think the intent of this style was to redirect attention from the butt toward the brain, as this was the hopeful early-Clinton era, when egalitarian relationships seemed possible. (Remember?) At any rate, I had no idea that the winds had shifted…until my separation from my husband when, sooner than I’d imagined, I began dating. As well as dropping the 15 pounds from stress and a cross-country move. When I went to the local mall to find some new clothes for my new, uncharted life, I found a curious dichotomy. There were hideous, “sensible” garments meant for folks in my age-range (I was 30), who were clearly perceived as spending all their time in a corporate office or on a golf course—or boat. Alternately, there was Juniors: clothes designed to make teens look like hookers. I didn’t want to appear 53 at 30, so I chose hooker-wear (I chose…the microwave!), and my lower back has been chilly ever since.

As the weather in my Northern town cooled and my pants sexily offered sparse cover, I began dating a 25-year-old—who later became the father of my child, but that’s another story. He told me that in his college classes he often noticed girls, as they rose from their chairs or walked around campus, spastically yanking their pants up in attempt to recapture parts of their lower back/ass that were poofing out. I don’t think he perceived this as flattering. So if this style disaster has been an attempt to please heterosexual men, one might question its success.

When I “became pregnant” a year later, I settled in for 9 months of pants misery. Anyone who has ever enjoyed maternity wear, and the changes of pregnancy, knows what I mean: at a certain point the pants either retreated in horror as they were forced toward my thighs, or, after seeming to fit, loosened and slid toward my enlarged feet. In the last trimester I often felt that I would give my kingdom for a pair of jeans with a zipper . But my post-pregnant era has provided scant relief for the overriding (low-riding) problem of pants designed to punish the fact that most of us, unlike prepubescent girls, have got “back,” and fill our stomachs with good food occasionally. OK, there’s also vanity. I could buy the golfing/ yachting/ office pants and have done with this. But I want to appear as if I have a sexual pulse, which has meant, among other things, never working in an office. I also have a generously-proportioned ass that requires restraint or containment, so baggier or high-waisted pants make it look HUGE. And I don’t have the budget to acquire whatever new styles are available to rich people, which may have moved on from the plumber-crack trend: I’m stuck in thrift stores where the jeans are from at least 5 years ago.

I wrote this because all morning—dropping my kid off at daycare; purchasing an iced coffee; crawling back into bed to stay warm, since New Orleans’ temperature has, in two days, just dropped from 89 to 59 (hi, Fall!)—I’ve been yanking and pulling at the little lip of denim inching down my post-brie-consumption hips…and realizing I don’t have a single pair of pants that gracefully accommodates this ever changing, feast-or-famine portion of the figure which is like a barometer of one’s moods and stance toward life.

Through the puddle

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.