Spring and All (redux)

I have been trying so hard to write, to think these days. I am so busy. My job doubled in January, quite literally. This is tech week, and then opening night for the opera and I just finished the penultimate chamber choir tour of the year.  

It has been one of the most beautiful springs I've experienced in Portland--vacillating between warm and floral scented, and wet and chilly. It has been perfect.  I've dug another pond in the garden, I've gotten a 20 cubic yard chip drop that i've hauled up the 30 steps, 5 gallon bucket by 5 gallon bucket.  I can't sit still, I bake bread and make occasional dinners. R. is working two jobs, 7 days a week, and some nights when we finally fall into bed, it's the first time we've been still together.

Two years ago, I was almost as busy--opera and choir and J. graduating from high school and publishing my third book, and then those disastrous months in late summer and fall, where the world fell apart. Then a year ago, I was going to the Oregon Book Awards and running and headaches and feeling like I would spin out of my skin as R. and I sat in the Armory at the awards and when my name was not called I almost wept with gratitude and then we slipped out as soon as we could. I don't think my body understands good excitement from bad excitement, I tried to explain to him, why I couldn't enjoy any of it. 

A year ago I was diagnosed with stage 2 hypertension. My father died of heart failure at 72. I cried in the doctor's office when she said I needed to go on medication, was so afraid to do so.

And then i did, and it was a small miracle. And then J. started to feel free in his own life. And then I stopped panicking every night, that familiar panic I've known since I got divorced and J. was yanked into his father's world every three nights, then the decade of travel. 

Anyway. I know that I overschedule myself because I don't know how to say no. Because I know best how to serve others (if i am not needed, then I am not loved, etc). Anyway, I am too busy to think, to write, to rest. Because I don't want to think, or feel anything, or be in my own life. 

Though, that isn't quite true. I realized this as I've walked through Portland's long and beautiful spring, everything blooming, pollen in my hair, that there was always a there I was desperate to build for J. and me. A life where we were safe.  He comes home from college a few times a week to go to Muay Thai class at the gym. I help him apply for an apartment. We talk about tattoos and birds and college. We make pancakes in the morning if he spends the night,and he always hugs me before he leaves the room, he always signs I love you whenever we say goodbye. 

Do you understand? The there I was so desperate to find is here. Yes, still America right now is terrible and I am so much older than I thought I'd ever get to be. I wept in my doctor's office because my blood pressure is normal because of the miracle of medication, and I don't feel like I'm going to tear out of my skin; because I can see fifty a few miles down the road, because my period comes whenever the fuck it feels like it and I know I'll never have any more children even though I have the only children I could ever want. I wept uncontrolably when my sister called to tell me she had become a mother, sobbing over the beautiful photographs of her new daughter,  and because the dogwoods are blooming and a song sparrow landed near my hand while I was in the garden. Because J. is safe in his own life and gets to build his own life, because i get to spend my evenings doing theater and music and in the garden or on a run and when I fall into bed, R. is there to catch me or at least put his hand on my hip. Because, as Nora Ephron wrote, I am sad about my neck. I wept again in the doctor's office when she said you need to expect your body to change. Perhaps you want to find a therapist who can help with eating disorders? I try not to act on any of my panic, I say. I come up with diet after diet, maniacal exercise plan after exercise plan and then I sleep on it and I often don't feel the same way the next day. Or as panicky. Or I'm just to goddamned busy to think about it for a few hours.

I don't think I fully understood how exhausting it is to not feel safe. To wake up and know that for the next 24 hours the most important thing is to manage the emotions of someone else. To know that if it goes sideways, it is dangerous. At some point, you start believing that it is your fault.

For so much of my life, I have been building bulwarks, doing everything I could to keep my head above water, keep my boy as safe as I could. I am almost 18 years out from my first marriage, two years out from the hell of court mandated travel. 

When I turned 48 two weeks ago, I got a song sparrow with a halo tattooed on my forearm. J. got a heron on his shoulder. He talks to me about his poetry class, lets me read one spare, beautiful poem. Today I ran a quarter marathon to make sure I was ready for my next race (quarter marathon sounds way more impressive than 6.55 miles). I planted jasmine, a climbing rose, clematis, raspberries, blackberries, butternut squash, I swept the porch and lugged a planter half my size into the back yard and up and down a bunch of steps, and sat in the garden where a family of juncos--mother, father and three babies, ate from the feeder. I got edits on a piece of non-fiction that will come out some time late this summer, I ran over my lines and cues for tomorrow's dress rehearsal. I poured an illicit glass of whiskey (we no longer drink much at all and especially on school nights).

Eighteen years ago, when I moved into our apartment on South Street, newly single, my boy barely two years old, I spent those nights when he was away sobbing, half drunk,  terrified I would never be safe but knowing htat the only thing to do was to hope. I got an ampersand tattooed on my left forearm: the most hopeful word in the English language, to remind me. 

And then here I am. All those years later, I don't feel much older than that 30 year old, but I'm goddamn proud of what she did. What we have built, J and me. 

Tonight we are on the porch, R. reading and me doing--well, this. Writing, I guess. I always think I am not writing and then I realize: oh, I've been doing it all along. Look, friends: I have no idea where I am, where we are. Except that we can do it, we must, we must, we must.