Tether

Friday before Memorial Day

I left work early; even now, there is guilt. A small lingering fear I might be caught out. And yet, while I was there, campus empty but for a few staff, a few dedicated math students in our lobby, I could barely focus. Department meeting, discussion of AI, walk to the pond to see if the heron was eating the newly stocked steelhead, watching clouds skiff over Mt. Hood.

This is the first summer I do not have to fly my boy to Michigan for 10 weeks, that I don't have to spend a weekend in an airport Doubletree Inn. I never have to do that again: rent a house by Lake Michigan, spend a few days, a week, something--running and walking and writing and drinking wine--while my boy stays with his father. Will I ever see Lake Michigan again, from the Michigan shores? Suddenly, I am bereft. Suddenly, I am free.

In two weeks, my boy and my stepson graduate from high school. My mom and sister and brother in law and in-laws and maybe my boy's father will be here. Then, a summer. My boy's first summer in Portland. Then they go to college. My god, I am so unbelievably proud of them. J. is going to a college I wish I could teach at, my dream school, small, liberal arts. Like the place where I found myself, then doubted, then lost myself.  But out of that, he arose. That was a thing worth sacrificing--my self, all these years, so that he exists. My goddess. He exists.

It has been a cold and wet, and then a very hot, spring. R. and I are on the porch, martinis and books and the scent of cedar, bodies, earth, on my skin. I left work early and picked J. up and came home and worked in the garden: hacked at the never-blooming wisteria, watered the annual vegetables, leveled a new raised bed. I bookmark permaculture videos. The mosquitos are weirdly bad.

I never thought we'd get here.

*

Memorial Day 

For eight years, J. and I spent this weekend in Michigan--one last long weekend, then two weeks at home, and then the turnaround, back to Michigan for the summer. It is strange not to have that pressure--that he will leave for 8 or 11 weeks, disappear, that he will exist only as a face on a screen, watery. And yet, in 10 weeks, he will leave for college. First, a trip into the Cascades to hike and paddle board, then orientation, then Fall semester. In less than two weeks, he graduates from high school, and this Thursday is his last day. I see pictures of friends' kids graduating and I cry. I cry at almost anything. A friend noted that I seem lucky from where she sits. I am lucky. J. is a remarkable human and I have worked so hard, we have traveled so many miles, paid so many thousands upon thousands of dollars in therapy and plane tickets and rental cars. Whatever it took, I have done. I have tried, at least, to do. I know that doesn't always work. I know that is sometimes not enough. I know terror can lurk anywhere. I am proud of what we have done, afraid of saying that out loud. As if it will be taken away.

I cannot write. I read, sporadically. I go to work, to choir practice, run. I spent the weekend in I suppose what counts as self care, though I hate that term, though it feels selfish, it feels frivolous. Doing simply what I want feels frivolous. I should be working. 

I ran a gloriously slow 12 miles in sunshine and cool air, though I strained something in my ankle, and the last two miles of 12 were painful and slow and mostly walking and I'm sitting on the porch with the Vasectomy Peas(TM) on my ankle (those motherfuckers are at least 7 years old). I wish I could write about running. Maybe someday I will. How I make bargains with myself: one more mile, walk two blocks, run three, turn down every street that looks interesting. I imagine myself in every neighborhood--those with towering trees, those sun-bleached, pet every stray cat, take photos of roses and weird houses and blackberry brambles and unexpected staircases. I check my phone, check the maps, listen to podcasts about Mormonism, listen to audio books: Prince Harry, Jonathan Van Ness, Pamela Anderson. I love celebrity memoirs. The first two miles are misery; the last two miles are bargaining. Somewhere in-between I forget I am running, I enter a trance state. When i get home, it feels odd that I've been everywhere been in neighborhoods I'd never heard of, never driven through.

But I can't write. I feel like I am floating above the world, lightly tethered.

*

Wednesday after Memorial Day

I've been hobbling around for a few days now. Spent a lot of time in the garden, transplanted a billion plants, mulched,cleaned the chicken coop. I haven't run since Sunday; have sung at rehearsal; dropped Jonah off at the high school today for the last time. I wept all the way to work, spent the day mostly immobile, came home and walked the olden dog with my boy, manic gardened some more. Now, my ankle hurts again. Repeat, vasectomy peas. Repeat, porch and whiskey and evening birdsong, distant sirens, cars revving on the highway. Facebook reminds me daily of my life a decade and a half ago: me, thirty, J. just two, our first beautiful apartment post-divorce. The olden dog, barely three months old, curled next to my boy in diapers on the couch. J. on a tricycle, J. and me at the fish hatchery, J. and me at the zoo. My hair is shorn almost to my scalp, I look barely twelve. And yet, I felt so old, so used up, so lost. The other day, I cut my hair again. When my former hairdresser cut it those years ago, she told me it was a hairstyle I could only have when I was young. I told that to my hairdresser last Saturday and she scoffed. You can do whatever you want. Her gold tooth caught the light. 

I love that boy who made me understand that, until he was born, I had never been in love in my life, that baby that made me wake up excited for what felt like the first time ever, to be awake and alive; that  little boy, that small person with his imperceptible lisp, his concentration on his drawings, his gentle and abiding love for his animals. The child who would crawl into my lap and ask for a rocky hug. Who slept in my bed, feet tucked beneath my hip, the dogs and cats arrayed around us like a fairy circle, something holy. We go for a walk around the neighborhood. I watch him and the olden dog and time is a palimpsest: man over boy, decrepit dog over puppy. 

The clouds to the south are lilac. Crows dash through the sky, song sparrows are singing their night songs. A small breeze. It is almost cold out here. The spring J. was born, it was blazingly hot until I went into the hospital, and then freezing for weeks. I was so hungry for color, for something other than the dun brown of an early Michigan spring, that I went walking too soon, the stiches in my episiotomy tore, I had to have it cauterized in the office, silver oxide, no pain relief. Weeks later, I drove myself and my starving infant to the hospital, my fever flaring to 105 degrees from mastitis. I couldn't nurse, my son was hungry. The nurse gathered me beneath blankets, put her cool hand on my forehead. You poor girl. I don't know how I survived those years.

My book launch is Friday. I read through the book again today--halfway disappointed, halfway happy--trying to figure out what to read. I thought this was a book about rage, but today it felt like kind of ember, the ash after great rage, the small stoked fire of a small life. I don't know. Once you write the damn thing, you figure out a further truth and whatever you wrote feels flimsy, a scrim, a screen, a pale morning mist. I've never really written about my books here, trying to keep a wall between my actual self and this self, which for so long I thought was safe. Oh, nothing is safe, Sara. And nothing safe is alive.

 Tomorrow, a preview concert, Friday a solo book launch. Then graduation.

I wish I could write.

*

Graduation (Thursday)

One of my sisters and her husband, my mother, my mother -in-law and sister-in-law all flew and drove in from various corners of the country. My anxiety was at a 120000000 out of 10, and when my ex attempted to invite himself to a family dinner I said no, it will be too awkward. J. sighed in relief. I will always be the bad guy for you, kiddo, when you need it. I will do whatever it takes.

I will do whatever it takes. Always.

When J. walked across the stage, I burst into ugly tears. My sister rubbed my shoulder. My boy, my boy, my beautiful boy. We were far up in the nosebleed section; I watched him on a screen, and in real life. Afterwards, he found me in the crowd and hugged me, hugged his stepbrother, hugged my mom and mother-in-law and sister-in-law and sister and husband. He was jubilant. He'd spent the night before out with a girl, coming home around midnight. The next day he slept until noon, then we walked around Lewis and Clark, where he'll be in the fall, with my mom and sister and brother in law, then went to my final choir concert of the season. 

Neither of us have been able to eat much for a week; both of us full of what I used to tell him, when he was small and bereft, big emotions. Tonight, Monday, he is out with the girl again. I am on the porch, the smell of jasmine, a small wind.

And today, four letters in the mail from the Friend of the Court in Kalamazoo, three telling me J. was no longer covered by his father's insurance from three separate jobs. The final letter announcing the case was closed. 

It means, I can say my name. It means, we are free. It means, I can say what I want, without fear of being dragged to court for this blog, this space, this truth. It has happened, more than once. At the book launch, someone asked me if now that the boys are adults I will write openly about what happened. I don't know, I said. I want to also inhabit what it means to be beyond it. 

It has been twenty five years. I was so, so young.

*

Monday, aftermath

I wish I could write, but I feel too light, so lightly tethered. I wish I could describe for you the garden, the bushtit nest I found in the  yard: it is lined with feathers and the outside is moss, lichen. How the light is now--gold and lightly held in the trees. The sun is going down. We are almost at the solstice. Birds call, tree to tree. I feel like something has been scoured clean in me, all the windows thrown open, a cloud of debris rising up and then dissipating into the air. I don't know what comes next. Hope, I suppose. At 30 I got an ampesand tattooed on my left forearm because is there a more hopeful word in the English language? Why can't you end a sentence with "and"? I ask anyone who asks what it means. Because it implies there is more. At 30, I was desperate to believe that hope was real, that I could survive by myself with my small child and that I could make us a life. I tattooed it into flesh. I wrote it above the doorway into my kitchen in our little suburban ranch in Kalamazoo. Hope is the thing with feathers.

It is what has carried me all these years, in its thin, silvery arms. R. is beside me on the porch, both of us reading, J. out with the girl, the air cooling, lavender, mock orange, jasmine. At work earlier in the day my boss, a man deeply invested in the patriarchy, told me what to do. No, i don't think I will,  I said.

The olden dog sighs in his sleep. I can hear children playing in the distance. The white noise of the highway, a few late crows.

Oh my friends. Oh, holy shit--we did it. 

We did it.