In Medio/In the Midst

August

A year ago we were in the thick of it. After 10 years of cross-country travel, 24 years of abuse from my ex, one would have thought the first year would have been easy. But how does one prepare for freedom when you've never known it? Last fall was the hardest year of our lives. And yet, I have never seen more clearly my love for my boy, R.'s love for our family, the safe landing we have built here, more clearly. J has asked me not to write about this time, so this is as much as I can say, but here we are on the other side. 

Yesterday he and I walked through the Mt. Tabor neighborhood and talked about music and art and life; on Thursday, he heads back to [insert college name here] to begin his sophomore year. 

I never thought about being in my late 40s (JFC, even to say that, late 40s, feels weird, ancient and yet I am the youngest I will ever be). I have published three collections of poetry. I sing with (and produce, and am president of the board) an opera company, sing with the best choir of my life, run half marathons, garden, bake bread, wake up every day next to my hot AF husband, go to work with my best friend, live an hour and a half from the Pacific Ocean,  have five cats, three chickens, and it is the last day of summer. 

Today I ran and then my boy and I played rummy while he ate dinner; I thinned the lambs ear and made cuttings of hazelnut, mock orange, ocean spray, red osier dogwood.I fixed the greenhouse, I fed the chickens, I pulled up bishops weed, i medicated the cats, I folded laundry, I made pancakes, I swept the floors. My boy and I talked about music and college and R turned toward me and put his hand on my hip soon after the sun rose and the yard smells of roses and dry earth and sunshine and --

October

I am in the waiting room of an ambulatory surgery center, R. somewhere behind the maze of doors, knocked out for a colonoscopy/endoscopy. His father died of colon cancer and dementia in his mid-80s, so this is mostly preventative, but I am sick with worry and fear, as I don't know any other way to be. The trees are starting to turn; the drive to the clinic through the West Hills early this morning was beautiful; to the west, the Coast Range lay swathed in mist and dawn-light haze. 

All of these medical appointments started almost a year ago when I got diagnosed wtih high blood pressure. R then went and got checked and the cascade of preventative appointments started. I hate it. I hate this aspect of aging, but I am trying to tell myself that this is the smart thing to do, the thing that will prevent catastrophe, that will let me keep R. for as long as we can be on this earth together. 

(Later)

Luckily, nothing concerning during the procedure and in the time since, I have helped J. move a mini-fridge into his dorm, find the dumpsters, ride the elevator with him, walk through the dorms at night. I am so grateful my boy tolerates my company like this. I am so grateful.

*

I walk a lot these days, and run less than I used to. Certainly, I run a lot slower than I did before I broke my elbow in 2020. When J and I would travel back to Michigan, those days and weeks I spent in Lakeside houses, I walked thousands of steps a day, mile after mile through mostly-deserted beach towns, only the townies left, the biggest houses with the best Lake views boarded up, the Lake choppy and beaches abandoned. Now, I come home from work and either run or walk or both. I go to choir rehearsal, I make loaves of bread, I garden a bit, feed the chickens, practice arias by the piano. And I often find myself angry--not at this life, for this life here, J. happy and content at school, R. working on his book, the house quiet and safe and cluttered, is happy and peaceful. But I see young families with toddlers and kids playing basketball in their driveways as dusk gathers its skirts, and I am angry. Angry that so many years were stolen from J and me, angry we spent so many years in limbo, angry at the way that I am still unwinding those years from my body. I'm angry that it took so many years to feel safe. I'm angry that I so rarely felt safe as a young parent and angry that it is so difficult to learn what it means to feel safe, to adjust to safety.

*

Christmas, 2024

It is hard to sit and write these days.Life is busy. J. goes to college, comes home a few days a week to go to Muay Thai and I drive him back to campus; I have choir, I have the endless drudgery of work. I run, or walk, or some combination of both. I taught myself to knit. We have stopped drinking for the most part (thank you, high blood pressure. Thank you wanting to live longer than my father lived) though tonight I am having a glass of whiskey before the four of us fly out to New Mexico tomorrow to see R.'s family. 

This is the second Christmas of freedom. Facebook shows me Christmases of years past--for J.'s first 8 years of life, they happened on the 26th, after his father dropped him off at my house on the 25th. J. believed Santa came on Christmas day for children of divorced families, while he still believed, before he realized Santa was a jackass for bringing poor kids shittier gifts that rich kids, and ignoring anyone who wasn't Christian. Anyway. He and I watched videos today of those Christmases in our little Michigan ranch, both dogs alive, before any of this here was even dreamed of, even possible.

Then the Christmases once we'd moved; endless airports, Christmas day alone while R. went to spend it with D. and his ex wife, runs up Mt. Tabor, hikes through the Tualatin mountains. Then, last year when things were on the edge of precarious, before J. started (again) at the university, before peace came.

There are so many things I love: this family. The theater company I try to help. The best choir I have ever sung with in my life. A job I only hate some of the time. An old, brokey-down house with high ceilings and a garden and the smell of rain through open windows. A partner I do not fear; a partner who holds me when I am afraid. These boys we've made and raised and love.

I made the traditional nutmeg sour cream overnight coffee cake. I made a lasagna, a Yule Log (or a 'gulag' as they boys named it years ago). We did presents in the evening, after D. returned from his mom's house. Instead of all of those years where I opened nothing, my pile was the biggest as it has been since I married R. He is the King of Christmas, the best gift-giver, the best partner and step parent and father.

I listened to a Lessons and Carols while making the Gulag and couldn't stop crying, nostalgic and grateful for my years singing at First Congregational in Kalamazoo, for my choir family there, for J and C and their children and how they took us in. I sang at a church this season for the first time since we moved and realized there is a large part of me that misses the rhythms of a faith year, that is so incredibly grateful to have had that time.

It has been quiet. I've run and walked, and J and I have played multiple games of rummy and he's kicked my ass each time; it's rained and the wind has blown and we'll spend a few days in the high desert of New Mexico where will we be quiet and J. and I will walk the arroyos and look for coyotes and maybe we'll see more stars, and maybe there'll be another BlowJob Mary at the Republican Neighbor's house again (the inflatable Mary and Joseph were, for years, stuck at an unfortunate (or fortunate, if one considers Joseph) angle). 

And I still mourn that my boy is mostly an adult, that I am closer to fifty than forty, that I spent so many years so afraid, that I had to spend so many years burning the fire of my fury, being the small, fierce animal that my college mentor told me I had to be. 

Who even uses a blog anymore? D asked this afternoon. Me,  I said. I sometimes do. It has been the place where I have read of the ordinary lives of women, have documented my small, ordinary life. When I was a girl, I was obsessed with Laura Ingalls Wilder. Yes, she is deeply problematic, and yes, she is a product of her time. But what she did well was describe her life--perhaps in a rosier way than the deep poverty of reality would have dictated--but she described her life in a way that made her life matter. I wanted more than anything to live a life that mattered. That was interesting enough to write about. When I left my ex, and decided that I would say aloud the things I believed I wasn't allowed to; that I would take a risk and believe that I wasn't crazy, that my one small, insignificant life mattered in the way that I knew my students' lives mattered, I started writing here. A diary but different. 

Anyway. I am finding myself at another turning point, another crossroads. My life has changed and I do not recognize it yet. In the same way that at 30 my life had changed nad I was desperately trying to stay afloat, that I couldn't see the beauty in what felt like chaos. 

Those Christmas eves I walked home alone, in the snow, after midnight service to my apartment, Bronson park still aglow. Those Christmas Eves I spent at the S's house, then to sing, then to wake alone on Christmas morning and welcome my boy home. Those years of grading paper after paper and then collapsing sick the moment I turned in my grades, beleiving myself so lonely I could die.

Those Christmases alone in Portland, or alone in airports, or suspended above the earth, above Kansas or Colorado or Iowa. Those nights in airport hotels eating cheese and bread and wine, walking through Ada Park, or along Lake Michigan; those flights home with my boy pressed against my ribcage, those late December days sick with flu or Covid or with my boy or without in New Mexico.

J. and I watched videos of him at 3, 4, 8; of our little snowbound house. This evening we played cards and tomorrow we will fly and he asked me to pull books of poetry for him to read while we are away. We traded chocolates from R.; R. and I made our dinner after our boys had eaten leftovers and went back to their rooms. Rain against my office windows. The youngest cat purring in my office armchair. The smell of onion and garlic and an extinguished candle.

Oh friends, if I never amount to anything more than this, I will have been the luckiest girl on earth. Even if i am writing to the Void. Even if no one reads this. I am neither rich nor thin nor beautiful nor successful nor famous nor brilliant nor anything I am supposed to want. I am just here, in this small imperfect life, somewhat happy, somewhat sad, wholly imperfect.

My boy, a mostly-grown man, hugged me tight this afternoon. We played cards; he kicked my ass, again.

Oh friends, or whoever it is that reads this, even if it is no one, is the Void: here we are, in the midst of it,

whatever it is. We are alive. 

*In Medio, by the way, is my choir.I love these people so much.