High Summer

 When J. was young, and I was still teaching, summer was languid--long hot days in our little Moorish apartment or in the house on Grosse Pointe, cicadas and humidity, trips the Lake, long hours we spent simply being with one another, hot and sticky, pointing the hose at the dogs, lying on the basement floor while tornado sirens wailed over the green skies. There were also those nights that J. would be at his father's where I would drink myself into a stupor, sit in my office or the little front porch or at the dining room table watching evening seep up from the reservoir woods, write poems or blog posts, so deeply sad and lonely but also free.

Then, I often felt guilty for the few days or hours that J. would be gone and I would be young and free. I went on dates, or spent the night with various boyfriends, went to movies or played poker with H. and D. I knew none of that would be possible if I had J. all the time, but I wished for it desperately. Summer was a stretch where he was with me most of the time--I didn't work, and his father left him with me all day, often not picking him up til 9 or 10 on his nights, dropping him back off at 6 or 7 in the morning.

When we came out here, summers shifted. J. disappeared for two months and I worked, read every book on cults in the library system, R. and I fought for the first time that first summer, my terror and depression so great I could barely hold it. My eating disorder came back with a vengeance. We had ten summers like that--J's face a watery apparition on Facetime. I learned to cope. R. and I went for a week to the coast or the mountain to write. I stitched those stretches along with the weekends and weeks I spent in houses along Lake Michigan when I traveled with J. I wrote two whole books. But we, J and I, lived with an undercurrent of anxiety. No, terror.

And then, it stopped. Oh, it was terrible that first summer, things J. has asked me to not write about and I haven't, but that first year after we didn't have to travel again was a crucible we both had to pass through, he had to pass through and I could just bear witness, be a safe place to land. 

And so I threw myself into work and choir and parenting and theater and writing and gardening. I stopped writing here so often. When I was telling my ex husband's secrets, I didn't feel obliged to protect him (though this has always been anonymous-ish, and I use no names and have switched blogs three times because it has never been safe to tell the truth). But those I love? I will protect them with my life.

And then we landed here, in this year, in this awful year where as a collective we are hurtling further into fascism. Concentration camps, mass deportations, every social safety net obliterated. I know people are surprised, but I am not. I lived the personal version of this for over 25 years. It is not surprising to me how much this country hates women and the elderly and poor and disabled and anyone who isn't a white man.But this year is also two years into the New Life, where J never has to travel to see his father ever again. Where he gets to be the steward of his own life. He comes downstairs every morning, hugs me before he goes to work as an inclusion aid at a summer camp, or when I get home from work, or when he heads out to Sauvie Island with his friends.

What I mean is: I have lived this personally and understand these motherfuckers. What I mean is: we can do this.

Today J and I  walked through neighborhoods near Mt. Tabor, talked about music and art and his first apartment and then R. and I later walked west through Laurelhurst, talked about retirement. I filled the chickens' water, the two new girls feeling safe enough to eat birdseed out of my palm; the garden is full of orb weavers and bumblebees and the plum tree is heavy with unripe fruit. 

On both walks, we talked about parents--how we have been parented, how we want to parent, how we wish we were parented. No one told me, at 21, that my horizons could be larger than a pinprick, that I didn't have to accept abuse in order to be allowed to live. Both J and D have been given the gift of being told that from birth; J. has seen what it means to be unloved but used. And now he gets his own life.

What I meant to write, when i sat down (evening, the day's heat dissipating, J. at his best friend's house watching the fights, D. in DC, R. in the chair across from me on the porch) was that I know for many of this this moment in history feels totally foreign. But for me it feels entirely familiar. And if you'd asked me even three years ago, inevitable. Then, I could not see a way out of it.

I was not surprised when the orange shitbird won his first term--I'd been married, and was inexorably linked, through our shared child, with Trump's poorer mirror. I knew that our culture, for all of its lip service to equality, believed: women were inferior, white men were superior and anyone who was black/brown/disabled/other was a piece of shit. I have been regularly told I am: crazy, a bitch, a slut, a frigid whore, a bad mother, only a mother, worth only my vagina, my tits, my willingness to submit. That my ex husband wasn't that bad, that I was exaggerating, that I shouldn't have asked for it, that I asked for it by marrying him, that shouldn't speak up, that I was aggressive, a bitch; that I had no right to write, anonymously, that I was regularly raped or abused or fuck, even the right to write anything about my life; that my ex husband regularly raped me during our marriage, that he threatened to kill me I'll chop the door into a million pieces with an axe if you are there with another man, that he harmed our child as my punishment to me, that he even convinced his now-ex wife to send me emails saying [X] told me you were fucking crazy and didn't even let [x] bath the baby because you were crazy; when my ex told me in comments on previous blogs that  I smelled of fish and hoped my new husband would reject me; when he said he hoped I got the China virus; when he ended every text  and email with MAGA! When he tried to get his lawyer to argue in court that I never be allowed to publish anything ever again--

What I want to tell all of us, every one of us who is terrified (I am terrified) is that these motherfuckers are cowards. These Fascist pieces of shit are terrified that we will recognize our power. Friends, we are the multitude. These shitbirds are nothing. This is their death gasp and it is deeply dangerous and your silence is exactly what they want--and need--to keep their power.

But please, let me and J be an example to you of what happens when you believe in something better. When you are willing to play the long game too. When you persevere. When you keep speaking up. When you push back. When you resist. Because everything I have done since telling my ex I was divorcing him--even though most of it was imperfect and not enough at the time--was to resist. 

This summer has felt almost as languid as those first safe summers. J and I walk through Portland safe and the sky is pearlescent, pink. R. sits next to me working on his next novel, or reading, or holding one of our cats gently in his elegant hands. Every morning the garden opens itself to me: orb weavers, the chickens clamoring for a handful of birdseed, J. stumbling downstairs for pancakes, D. texting what is this bird? from DC,  new tomatoes, a mother and son walking through the rising dusk,  the cats scattering when I start learning a new aria at the piano--

I haven't written anything for so long, I say to R. We go for a walk, 87 degrees, my phone in my back pocket, we talk about our boys, about this life we have built,  and one of my faculty texts: You just sent me what sounds like Icelandic electronica. Accidentally.

I hate that I am not teaching anymore. I text back OMG to no response. My best friend texts about separating from her husband. I love her. R. sits next to me, reading, J with his friend west of the river, watching the fights, D. in DC and the sky going pale, crows calling across the distances. My horoscope tells me things are going to change. The air smells of jasmine and earth and dry cedar. There is no humidity. This is neither Michigan nor Illinois. This is a new place,  a place we have chosen, a place thatI could never have imagined 20 years ago. That's the thing: life opens in a way we could never dream of.

Friends, we can fight these motherfuckers. Friends, we can win. Whatever we thought was possible--it is, yet different. But it takes the acknowledgement of terror. The willingness to walk into terror, to hold on to each other.

That's what will win it. We have each other. That's all there is. The only god is our willingness to love our neighbor. Here is my hand, friend--