Saturday Night, Approaching Equinox

The neighbors behind us--famous for growing the largest pot plant (protected by an all-winter long 20 foot tarp tent), for coughing up said weed in regular painful hacks, for a barking dog, for a vibrant raised bed of vegetables visible from our second story deck, an occasional baby, a fortieth birthday party with balloons and clinking of glasses, of parties that always involve a little fire and are always quiet by 10 PM--are having band practice in their garage. They are, thankfully, quite good. Often, one of them will sit in the yard after work and play the acoustic, sing a bit. Today, it's the full band--electrified, drums. It might be band practice, it might be a house show.

It is the last warm days of summer, already dark at 7:45 PM, the air cooling rapidly from 90 degrees to 73 to 50 overnight. At night, the cats curl on the bed, and the dog moans himself into a little half moon on his bed on our bedroom floor.

Ground yourself, S. Remember the world, the tiny orchard you planted two weeks ago, the little apple tree, the plums. Remember the air and the earth and the ocean and the Lake. Remember the smell of cedar and dirt and the chicken coop and the feel of a warm egg in your hand. Asters blooming, goldenrod, the last tomatoes ripening on the vine.

There have been un-bloggable things, drafts I have written and left unpublished, little poem-lets in my draft files that are too painful to look at right now, that aren't my story to tell. This is not the autumn we were expecting and yet it is the autumn we have. I have opera rehearsal and the faculty return to campus this week, students next. I hurt my knee while running up Mount Tabor again, same knee, different hurt. There is a small breeze, there is more than small grief around here. 

Two weeks ago, as the unbloggable things occurred, I cut all of my hair off, short as the photo I have of J. and me when I was thirty-two, he four, my hair an inch or two long. We are at the Wolf Lake Fish Hatchery on West Main, west of Kalamazoo, sandwiches in our hands. I was so full of grief then, so determined to burn my little flame of hope. I would drive us places with our little takeout sandwiches, determined to get us out of the house, somewhere near water. We'd go to the hatchery, watch steelhead leap at the hatches of flies in mid September, or to a little pond behind a dentist's office in Richland, or Lake Michigan in January where all of the seagulls would be facing one direction, wind blasting from the west.

Now we are west, as far West as I could get us. We have been here almost a decade. My boy has grown from a child into a man. His grief is my grief, and I desperately just want to hold him, let him feel all that he has not allowed himself to feel for 10 years as he's been shuttled across the country, not allowed to develop the social network he desperately wants and deserved, until this summer. And now, everything is changing, as it always changes. But he is safe enough to feel it, and Jeremy Christmas, such feeling hurts. Is a grieving. 

I cut my hair because I want to remember that 32 year old me, burning with hope and rage and sorrow and who first starting writing here, or at least on that first blog, who knew only that I had kept secrets for too long, had not felt anything and was suddenly feeling everything, who had a job that I adored but who felt unmoored and terrified and lonely and utterly incapable of navigating any of it and was desperate to not be alone, to not feel like my life was a secret and that there might, just maybe, be people out there that understood. That me is both embarrassing and aspirational: I feel so old and self conscious now.

When I left my marriage, few people knew how miserable I was.  To everyone, I was fine. I was an English professor, I was a writer, a singer, I was capable and FINE. And then, suddenly, I was not. I never was ok, but one morning I woke up and couldn't fake it anymore. or at least, I couldn't fake it to myself. It's amazing how long we can fool ourselves.

When we first met, R. called me "Capable Girl," because it has always been so important to me for everyone to believe I am fine, I am in control.

It is 9 PM and band practice continues, quieter. They are good. Often, J. and I talk about bands, he suggests bands I'd like, we discuss '90s bands we both like. I think in two years, it's my 30th high school reunion. I think maybe I'll go. The breeze has picked up--a soft shushing in the branches of the deodar, the yellow cedar. J. is downstairs, lifting weights. R. and I are on the porch, a glass of wine, a glass of whiskey. He is reading Updike, I am reading feminist theory. The air is cool.

When I left Kalamazoo, I left a family I'd built from scratch: my singing family, my students, a community of writers and colleagues. In Portland, I had R. and D., but was unsure if I would ever have community, though I knew I needed to take that chance in order to give my boy a chance to be himself. I'm 46 and in so many ways much better than I was at 32. I have a stable and loving marriage, I have a stable yet soul-murdering job, I live in a place that affirms me and my boy, I have a singing career that is fulfilling and challenging, I have a community and have time and space to write and am financially secure in a way I have never been. But still. But still. But I thought we could outrun this grief. I thought I could protect him from it completely. 

It was when I left my first marriage and lived alone with J. for the first time, that I felt safe, or something like safety. And in that safety of coming home to an apartment free of rage and fear, that I discovered something broken in me. Or rather, the dam that had been holding me from feeling broke. Suddenly, I felt everything and was wracked with it. After a decade of feeling nothing, feeling everything flattened me. I did not have the language or understanding or lived experience to hold that flood, and for a while I had to just let it flow over me.

So too must my boy feel everything, I suppose. 

I want to remember who I was when I faced that terror, when I stood in the flood and out of pure stubbornness would not let it kill us. It will not kill us this time either. It will not get us. I built a family around us then, and have built this little family around us now. I must believe that the small, fierce animal that was in me then is in him now.

May my boy know the ferocity of his mother, the ferocity that is in his DNA. May he know that he is a lion, that he is born for this, that he has a village, that he is loved. That he is loved. That he is love.