Sorrow Prepares You For Joy

What would the world be without Rumi? A dark and terrible place, I think. A place I wouldn't want to be.

Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place.

~ Rumi ~

I confess I have not deeply read his writings; rather, it seems like the universe sends them to me at times that are most appropriate. Which is very considerate of the universe, seeing as how I have not always been its most enthusiastic or reverent member.

If I had read this two years ago, it would have washed over me like rain on a newly-waxed car. Today, this quote speaks to a place in me that is so deep I cannot see the bottom. With a child newly returned from Paris, spring on the horizon (even as clouds and chilly rain move in), and a plethora of professional and personal opportunities offering themselves up, this quote gives me, dare I say it, hope. Curiosity.

The tagline of this blog is "Seeking joy." How nice would that be? Joy.

Do I dare hope?

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Single Parenting: Don't You Yell At My Child!

It's funny, but it is only just now sinking in that I am a single parent. How strange is that? I would read articles online about the struggles single parents face and think to myself about how hard it must be for all those single parents out there. Which is ironic, because with one parent of the parenting team dead you don't get much more single. I have been a little slow for the past 24 months, but I finally got it.

I am actually a single parent, and it sucks in one really unexpected way: no one will ever share my child with me the way Dane did.

Yes, dealing with financial worries and plumbing and the stupid fucking computer and discipline and The Teenager's crushes is really hard. Yes, I have friends around who will give me a break and willingly take The Teenager when she is being awful or will let me sit at their kitchen bar or table and drink really delicious cocktails or work in peace when I just can't take it anymore. Yes, the practical parts of being solely responsible for the life of another person is sometimes crushing and requires huge sacrifice, but that's not the hardest part.

The hardest part is that no one will ever share The Teenager with me on a cellular level. No one will ever look across the room when she does something amazing and feel the same kind of pride I do. No one will love her the way I do. The only other person who was there THE WHOLE TIME is now in a box on my dresser. The only person that shares the birth story (and, well, the conception also) is no longer here.

I am not currently dating anyone because I am a hermit and strangers are awful so how will I ever meet someone, but in the event that a miracle occurs and I suddenly become less critical and judgmental and meet a dude to date, he will not understand that when I say, "I just want to poke her in the eye!! What a jerk!!" that he is not really allowed to say, "I know! She's a total jerk!!" Dane could say she was a jerk and get away with it because underneath there are all those little cells that make her part of us in a very physical way, a way that prevents us from meaning too deeply what we say when we call her a jerk.

A stranger, some new dude, won't have those cells. He won't know on a cellular level about the time when she cried for five hours straight and almost fell off the bed because she refused to just LAY DOWN AND GO TO SLEEP. He won't get how compassionate she is, even when she pushes the dog away, because he doesn't really know her. He won't know when she is nervous just by looking at her hands, or how happy she is by watching her walk.

And when she is being 100% teenager he might be tempted to criticize the way she thinks, acts, or dresses, but he won't have the right to do that. To be clear, no one really has the right to do that, but some dude thinking he can waltz in here and insert commentary should probably just waltz right back on out of here.

Dating after divorce (really, the more common form of single parenthood and the whole reason for this blog, as a friend of mine is going through this right now) is probably very much the same, especially when your ex- is a shitbox. My friend's ex- is a dangerous shitbox, so in addition to being on edge when her kid is with the ex-, many states away, she has to deal with knowing that her boyfriend is happy the kid is away for awhile. I don't think it is possible to describe in words how deeply hurtful that is. It's also not grounds for a sustainable relationship, knowing that the person you are with is biding their time until The Kid is out of the picture.

Newsflash: The kid is NEVER out of the picture. Maya Angelou said that having a child is like consenting to have your heart walk around outside of your body, and I can't find a better explanation of this type of love. The kid may be off at college or in the world, but they are forever a part of you in a way that is real and true and inexplicable. When someone insults The Kid, they are insulting you, even if you are the healthiest, most non-striving parent who is not living through their child. And the insult is not a flesh wound; it's deep, slow to scab, easily re-opened with the smallest conflict.

I have another single parent friend who deals with this by just never introducing her boyfriend of many years to the kids. Or rather, they have been introduced, but the contact is minimal.

Are you a dating single parent? How do you deal with this thorny issue?

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Mark Strand: Lines For Winter

Mark Strand, Pulitzer-prize-winning poet, died today, and I'll be damned if he didn't write just about the best poem to encapsulate my mood. His other poems are equally gorgeous and spare in tone, but this one is particularly timely for me.

Lines For Winter 

Tell yourself
as it gets cold and gray falls from the air
that you will go on
walking, hearing
the same tune no matter where
you find yourself --
inside the dome of dark
or under the cracking white
of the moon's gaze in a valley of snow.
Tonight as it gets cold
tell yourself
what you know which is nothing
but the tune your bones play
as you keep going. And you will be able
for once to lie down under the small fire
of winter stars.
And if it happens that you cannot
go on or turn back and you find yourself
where you will be at the end,
tell yourself
in that final flowing of cold through your limbs
that you love what you are.

Offered without commentary today simply because I can't quite encapsulate the sneakiness of grief, almost two years later, as Christmas lights twinkle and the weather gets darker. This is why we have poets: to say what we mean, and mean what we say.

What are you telling yourself these days?

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Still I Rise

 

It's 9:48 in the morning on a weekday, and I am in bed. I got up earlier and took The Kid to school, came home and wrote a little, then just decided to get back into bed.

I can do that, most days, but I choose not to. Today, I am stressed by the bids we have been getting to rehab the house, tired from consistent poor sleeping, and entering hibernation mode as I do this time every year. I just want to sleep, watch TV, and make soup.

This becomes problematic when one is trying to get anything done.

This also becomes problematic when one feels one has to justify one's ability to go back to bed mid-morning on what most people consider a work day.

I, too, consider it a work day. I just work differently, I guess. Everything is different, though. I am not the same person I was a year ago. I am not in the same house, state, job, thought space. Part of this feels like depression, but part of it feels like taking stock, exploring, and getting ready for the next thing. It's grief, in an odd stage that doesn't have as much crying, which is nice for making other people feel comfortable, but this grief has a short fuse. It requires the time and space to process bits of things at a time.

So when I go back to bed I try not to be hard on myself for doing so. I will get back up.

"Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise." 

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The Habit Of Reading

Since Dane died I have lost my habit of reading.

I have read everything I could get my hands on since I was little: cereal boxes, advertisements, comics, novels, bumper stickers, street signs, billboards. All fair game. I read myself nearly blind with a flashlight under the covers after dark, and nearly sick on long car rides. I read in restaurants, at the beach during breakfast/lunch/dinner, on play dates, and during classes that were boring throughout my academic career. I have read both widely and deeply in my free time and as a teacher and an English major and a person generally dedicated to the written word.

When Dane died, nothing written has really kept my interest. These days I have a hard time concentrating deeply on anything in longer than two- or three-minute chunks. Fiction is hard to stay invested in, unless it is Jhumpa Lahiri or T.C. Boyle, and non-fiction, although more intriguing, floats into my brain and right back out.

This has not really been a problem beyond just one more sadness in a year of extraordinary loss, until now, as a newly minted docent at the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM). Now I find myself needing to concentrate for a period of time that lasts longer than 140 characters. I need to be able to take in and retain information, then shift and respond to questions about that information. Intellectually I know how to do it.

My brain doesn't feel up to it, though. I get tired when I start to read deeply, and my eyes become blurry. I find that I need to take breaks at the same time that I find that I need to make myself push through that fatigue, which may or may not be real. My brain jumps at shadows and resists.

Even sitting down and writing this has been difficult today. I am exhausted trying to express myself, and compelled to do it anyway.

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Pulling The Trigger, Or My Year Of Grieving Dangerously

A gun metaphor seems appropriate for Charm City, even though the murder total is down from last year.

This morning while I was avoiding doing any sort of work, I came across the opportunity to train to be a volunteer docent at the American Visionary Art Museum (AVAM). AVAM is my newest most favorite museum. It is filled with untrained artists, lots of local color, and the quirkiest, best, most non-museum-y gift shop ever. You would think I would jump at that opportunity, as I am sure it comes with free stuff, like memberships, etc, and I am all about trading.

But I am having a hard time pulling the trigger.

There are other things I haven't done that I could have, a few opportunities here and there that I have passed on by doing nothing.

It's hard not to beat myself up about this a little, but I recognize that is ridiculous.

The second year of grief, which is over halfway finished, has been marked by constant motion. CONSTANT. From finishing the tiny house to showing it at the White House to moving it to Delaware to packing the townhouse to moving the bulk of our stuff to storage in Baltimore to cleaning and fixing the townhouse to rent to finally moving to Baltimore (take that, grammar check). CONSTANT MOTION.

Now we find ourselves in a purgatory of moving, staying with friends and looking for a house, settling into routines that will be upended and re-established when we finally move into our own space. When I am alone, I have been melting into a well-loved reclining rocking chair by the window, working periodically but mostly watching the world outside the windows and listening to the dogs snore (and bark wildly whenever someone walks by).

It's not relaxing, necessarily, so much as it is just stopping. Not moving. No motion.

So when it's time to move again, the laws of physics kick in. Inertia. It's hard to get the object in motion.

Even for things I know I will enjoy, it is hard to get up out of the chair to make them happen.

I think this is part of my Year of Grieving Dangerously. Now that we have made a huge move and instituted changes, the real work begins. I am writing, which is immensely satisfying, and I am in a state and a city I love, which I have waited for years to come home to, but the interior work that requires simultaneous action and reflection is still in progress. I think the key is to do it whether or not I want to. To make plans and go into the world.

Very complex. Very difficult. Feels impossible.

It is every part of the first two and nothing of the last, but still. It's that part of nothing to look forward to and every possibility in front of me at the same time. It's the part of grief that isn't wailing and weeping and woe-is-me-ing but is just as potent and powerful and capable of sitting you on your ass. In a well-loved reclining rocking chair by a window. Waiting for snow.

Trying to pull the trigger.

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This Just In

I am writing another book.

Details to follow.

I am hoping that by making a public announcement of this I will actually finish my outline, flesh out each chapter, and put deadline dates for myself on a calendar.

I plan to have it ready to go by the end of the spring. I think it is going to be more complicated than I am planning, but if I can get a draft together it means I am on the path.

Hint: this one is going to be a good one. Non-fiction. Chicks, construction, tiny houses. Projects. #Skillz #GirlPower

Oh, and I am looking for representation and a book deal. #DetailsDetails #IfYouWriteItTheyWillCome

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Lean In

So it has been quite a while since I wrote anything here. A week is a week too long, for sure, and I have no excuse.

Except moving takes up a lot of time and energy, and sometimes it's nice to lay in the hotel bed with a remote in one hand and a drink in the other and watch crappy TV.

That was one night. I have no excuse for the others.

As we make the final push out of Georgia and begin to look north to rearranging our lives in Baltimore, I find myself retreating back to the settee and just staring out the window. Part of this is very much due to the fact that we have been packing and moving and cleaning and selling and rearranging like meth-fueled hamsters on a wheel and I am just exhausted and worn out.

The other part is the need for reflection and a moment of calm in the midst of this change. We spent 13 years in Georgia (probably about seven years too many, but that's neither here nor there. It simply is, and although I wonder what would have happened if we had actually left after my father died in 2006, I cannot let my head go there too long. "What if" is a waste of time and can be crazy-making. But I digress.).  I have written and erased this sentence five times because I don't know what to say about that. It has been a struggle mostly, these 13 years, but there have been some moments of joy. Few and far between, but there.

Georgia is the last place I saw my husband alive, and I am frankly struggling with that. Thankfully, he is neatly packed in a box labeled "Daddy," so I can bring him along wherever, but it is  a little strange to be leaving the first house we bought together and the last house he lived in, just down the street from the tree where he breathed his last breath in the small hours of a cold February morning. I wonder if it will be liberating to be in a city that doesn't have quite so many ghosts. I wonder if it will be sad. I wonder if I will start (continue?) talking to a box filled with ashes.

I also wonder if I might be a teeny, tiny bit crazy these days. #Possible

Pema Chodron talks about fear and uncertainty like this: “To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man's-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. ”  She counsels us to lean in to uncertainty, to lean in to fear, to embrace wretchedness as the other half of gloriousness. 

So, in my own way, I am leaning in. I am feeling the fear and am willing to die over and over again. I am trying to be compassionate with myself as I give in to grief on occasion, or laziness, or anger, or impatience. I may not be fabulous at being fully present every moment, but sometimes I get a breath of that in brief snatches, and it is lovely.

And then there is this: “Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that. The healing comes from letting there be room for all of this to happen: room for grief, for relief, for misery, for joy.” 

So maybe the reflection and staring out the window and lack of (written) action is my way of making room for all of these things, mentally. Cleaning out the house is physically making room for the flood. Giving me room to just lean in to it all.

There is no real end to this, so I will leave it at that.

Photo by Michelle Tribe via Flickr