Minor Poet in Somewhere, America

It was late Saturday afternoon in August. R and I were supposed to be going on a date night before D came over for the week, and—no, but—I felt that now familiar weight, I could barely muster a sentence, brush my hair, put on anything other than my Saturday house dress which, I suppose, is better than my hobo pajamas. Are you doing ok? R asked earlier, you don’t seem like you are doing ok. 

 Yes, I don’t know. Maybe. Not really. So instead of going out, which seemed unbearable (what would I have to talk about at all? My mind felt empty, my neck stiff and my back aching, we went for a walk. Is there anything that is making you feel anxious? R asked, innocent, still believing there could be an outside trigger. no, it just feels like my brain can’t access what it means to be happy is what I wanted to say. It was warm, R held my hand, we pet neighborhood cats. Later, I went for a long run hoping that the combination of running endorphins and Verdi’s Requiem coursing through my earholes would tilt me toward a better mood. Instead, I could barely leave my office for the rest of the afternoon, my run over and enjoyable, but it didn’t have the miraculous cure I was hoping. 

 I feel stuck. I keep writing—and not publishing, not saying aloud—I want to blow up my life. And it doesn’t feel like writing; on that front, I feel absolutely dry, my fourth manuscript floating in the depressing submission abyss of rejections and in progress submittable options. And I keep thinking back to last spring, when I was busy beyond busy with performing and I felt joyously happy and sure that I’d feel that way forever. 

Of course, I got my period that day so that explained some of it. And of course it was a surprise, as it was only two and a half weeks since I last got my period and before that it was 51 days and truly I hate how cliché this is, but I’m a 49 year old woman staring down her 50th birthday and feeling old and washed up and afraid I won’t do the things I wanted to do at 21 before I met J’s dad and my life took a decade’s pause. God, how cliché, this midlife crisis of wondering if who I thought I was is not who I am now, etcetera! I’ve now been a college dean as long as I was a college professor. But also—god, I’m so bored! But also stressed! I make lists in my office so I don’t forget meetings, things I must submit, and I still forget meetings, I stand at my desk with a splitting headache and want to cry. And I don’t know what to do with myself now that I come home to a house with just Rob writing and, every other week for the summer, D repairing watches at the kitchen table and Jonah comes by once a week at most and instead of using this newfound time to create and write brilliant poems (my first teacher won the Pulitzter! my friends have won major awards and are Full Professors of Creative Writing, a job that feels like (and I know it shouldn’t, I know it shouldn’t the only Legitimate Job of a Poet), instead I’m watching Tiktoks and trying to disassociate about the Looming Food Crisis and Utter Fucking Dystopia That Is America. '

And yet I still stand in the mirror and note the soft curve of my belly, the ways I have let myself go (go where, Sara? Into the world? Into this life?) The soft animal of my body. Etcetera. I imagine diets I will put myself on. I imagine how I can make myself disappear. 

I hate that it is so cliché—I’m a woman in a patriarchy who is terrified of growing older, losing what feels like the only real social capital that I have. And I was not a girl who ever was told or believed I was beautiful and only after my disastrous first marriage of rape after rape, after becoming a single mother who was told by old men at church you’re more beautiful than you know, or colleagues who pressed me, shirt above my neck, into the grass outside the college, colleagues who fucked me on top of the parking garage as the sun went down and then said I don’t know if I love you or I love my wife (sir, I can tell you that you love neither of us you fucking chud); after meeting and marrying a man who is gentle and kind and the best kind of father to his son and my son, who believes I am beautiful and desirable and this should be enough. 

 Yet I rarely believe I am enough. 

 I look at photographs of my grandparents’ houses, my first house of my first marriage, make plans to do a concert in March in Kalamazoo with my first professional quartet; and I want to run. Maybe that’s what I am struggling with now, or part of it. I have run out of each incarnation of myself: out of Chicago at 18, desperate to not be a fuckup who doesn’t live up to her potential. In elementary school, I was identified as Gifted and Talented; began taking the SAT every year with a group of fellow savants. But unlike them, I started failing my classes, likely had (still) undiagnosed ADHD, couldn’t bring myself to do homework or most executive functioning tasks: cleaning my room, organizing anything at all. I remember when my college roommate and for a while best friend told me I don’t understand why you are so opposed to organizing things, Sara; it’s easy to do and I felt such shame. yes, it is easy for everyone else but for me it causes a kind of inside panic, a complete shutting down. 

 And months later, I come home from work and take my blood pressure because I’m sure my pills aren’t working anymore: all day my head pounding, slight nausea, the desire to disappear. The machine tells me I’m okay, tells me my heart, anyway, isn’t the problem. R. wraps me in a hug, I text J. who is a little sick, who sends me a video of himself in his Halloween costume. He’s wearing a toga in his little city apartment, making unrelenting eye contact with the camera, while holding a staff in one hand and swinging nunchucks in the other. He’s your clone, a friend recently said when she saw a photograph of him. 

Anyway, by the time I was a junior in high school my guidance counselor told me I was hardly college material and I had two years to physically force myself to get out. And I left and almost literally never went back. After my junior year abroad, I never went home for longer than a week or two. And then when I left Kalamazoo, I never went back except a few times. Oh, J and I had to travel to Michigan a dozen times a year but I stayed as far away as I could, made myself anonymous along the lakeshore. It was like a wound that hurt too much to touch; all those people I loved and left, all those past selves I thought I could leave behind forever. When my parents—my father, really—left Chicagoland for Minneapolis after 9/11 and the collapse of the airline industry my father had devoted his professional life to, I don’t know if he ever went back except for his mother’s funeral. He runs away from hard things, I thought. My parents’ exodus also meant that my sisters and I were permanently cut off from our family in Chicago too, as they never went back and no one invited us without them. I hated this about my parents for a long time, but I get it. 

I’m just like my father—I’ve blown up my life three times now and run away and want to do it again, disappear up the west coast, build a new life and a new self somewhere else. Except. Except what I wanted to give J most of all was a steady home base and Portland is home for him. Except what I wanted most to give myself was a home and Portland is home for me in a way that no other place has felt like home. Maybe it’s because I feel safe here—with R and J and D and a family we’ve built that is supportive and healthy and all of us get to show up as simply ourselves. (Why can’t I be satisfied that this is enough?)

 My father spent his entire professional life doing a job that ultimately killed him because he had made himself responsible for the rest of us. No wife of mine will ever work, he told my mother when they got married, a kind of misplaced chivalry. His grandmother—widowed at 40—raised four boys on her own, buried one after the War, died in her 60s. His mother stopped working full time when she married my grandfather, and they lived with his mother and then moved to the suburbs. When he died, she was left unable to survive on her own. My father drove from Deerfield to Midway every morning at 5 AM to work on airplanes and came home and put his four daughters through college, paid the mortage, paid the property taxes, made sure none of us every went hungry though we didn’t have many frills: no vacations, none of us had a car besides my parents, we shopped at Kmart and Venture and clipped coupons and always bought the cheapest option of everything. But we had piano lessons and ballet and park district baseball and my sisters got to go to horseback riding lessons and clarinet lessons and sleep away camp. 

My mother worked quietly on the side—daycare provider, TruValue cashier, elementary school elementary school parapro, seamstress. She kept her own bank account, and when my dad died at 72 she was ok—financially, at least. Emotionally? I have no idea. We don’t talk about emotions. We are not supposed to feel things in this family. She’s never mourned him (no funeral, no obituary, no mention of him because to feel things is to fall apart). 

 I understand him now. My job keeps our mortgage paid, keeps us insured (and with a kid with life-threatening chronic illnesses, R’s cancer diagnosis in 2017, my heart diagnosis, Jonah’s and my mental health), I haven’t had much of a choice. 

I love my faculty and my staff and a few administrative folks including my librarian bestie. But it also feels like it’s going to kill me. I directly supervise 142 people during the academic year. But I do this so we all can live. But, most of the time I’m just with fellow administrators I hate it. And I can’t write. 

I go to choir rehearsal, opera rehearsal. Board meetings. I try to remember the things that make me feel alive. I line up a few readings for my 3 year old book. It’s something. I couldn’t write at all until I decided to write the most terrible fantasy novel of all time, and I’m 25,000 words in and it’s absolute trash but it’s fun. And then something unlocked and I’ve written a few poems, a few essays, like this one. I also struggle to read, so force myself every day to read for 30 minutes. 

Maybe I’m destined to be a Minor Poet in Somewhere, America. And I’m still the undiagnosed ADHD disappointment because I know I can’t stay on topic, one thing leads to another. I wish I could just stay on one thing for a while and figure it out. I know I keep running away. 

The other night, I was reading in my office with Mike the cat curled next to me on the armchair. And when I got up to make dinner, I lightly put my hand on Mike’s flank and he flew across the room, tiktok hilarious animal style, knocking into the window, knocking the lamp off my desk. He spent the rest of the night running around the house, puffed up like a porcupine. 

Tonight he’s back next to me on the chair, his body pressed up against mine. He does not care that I doubt myself. I am warm, I am safe, I saved him from a life on the mean streets of Gresham. 

J texts me when he’s sick do you have any zofran? I drive over and give him dramanine, Gatorade, clean his kitchen, brush his hair off his forehead and tell him I love him. 

D texts me about his houseplants. R. orders dinner on our one night free of the eternal slog of making dinners. J texts me i love you. 

What if you just walked into the difficult thing, Sara? 

 What if this is it.