Alecto's Ophelia

A love letter from Cielo

Dearheart,

I have always wondered if I'd have the opportunity to use the word, or phrase 'dear heart'. It seemed out of reach when I read it and I don't believe I ever heard anyone speak it. I wandered about the interwebs looking for the etymology because it seemed to matter and of course, this is a very old word and goes right back to the Middle Ages. The last quoted use of the word that I could find was published in 2005 so it's certainly not dead, just not in use. Why is it we don't speak our hearts?

When you look up the word, the two sources that come to the top most frequently are the 2005 publication of Anita Diamont's, The Last Days of Dogtown (Dogtown!) and the 1684 publication of John Bunyan's, Pilgrim's Progress, Part 2. Despite what is lovely about, "I'm not deserting you, dearheart. I'll be home tomorrow, or the day after.", the underlying set of messages in Part 2 of Pilgrim's Progress is significantly compelling. 

I haven't done much more than skim it at this point but from the analysis and reviews (I passed on Sparknotes) I believe he pulls women to the forefront allowing them opportunity to be heroes in their own right and perhaps the lives of others as that's often what happens when we own ourselves. 

We don't have to be made of steel to be brave. I realized once between jobs that while a good percentage of men in our country face being the only source of income in a family, they can't be any stronger or better equipped than me to cope. Not necessarily. Right? So why did I feel so helpless sitting on my porch wondering what would happen if I didn't get myself re-employed pretty damn quick?

We don't have to be made of steel to be brave.

There was something else about Bunyan's second publication that stood out for me. Alexander Witherspoon, professor at Yale, wrote in a prefatory essay: 

"Part II, which appeared in 1684, is much more than a mere sequel to or repetition of the earlier volume. It clarifies and reinforces and justifies the story of Part I. The beam of Bunyan's spotlight is broadened to include Christian's family and other men, women, and children; the incidents and accidents of everyday life are more numerous, the joys of the pilgrimage tend to outweigh the hardships; and to the faith and hope of Part I is added in abundant measure that greatest of virtues, charity. The two parts of The Pilgrim's Progress in reality constitute a whole, and the whole is, without doubt, the most influential religious book ever written in the English language."

"The incidents and accidents of everyday life are more numerous,"

"...the joys of the pilgrimage tend to outweigh the hardships;"

"...and to the faith and hope of Part I is added in abundant measure that greatest of virtues, charity."

I really had to break that up to see the whole thing but those three parts are what had me pluck the use of the term of endearment from 1684 instead of 2005 even though the 2005 reference relates to the eighteenth or nineteenth century (can't quite tell). 

It was John Bunyan who told me exactly who you are. 

Who we are is not aways we who we get to be. It is almost certainly never who we always get to be. Life is too busy happening and we are too busy being human for the best parts of us to shine at two hundred watts 24/7 even though we think they should.

Tragedy is when we define ourselves by the percentage of our failures.

We don't have to be made of steel to be brave and we don't have to ring the bell at the top of a pole someone else planted in the ground to meet our objective. ...keeping in mind that a lot of those poles with bells at the top are rigged. Just sayin'.

Dearheart, if I told you who you are to me, would you hear me? Could you hear me through all that noise? If I told you what you've done for me, would you be able to see it? Could you? Would you believe me? 

Dearheart, if I told you that through me you make a difference in the world you can't even see, would you understand? Would let it in? Would you accept that you are far greater than you have ever believed? 

Dearheart, if I handed you a mountain of evidence supporting the difference you are in my world, in my life, in the lives of my children, and the world around me, would you be able to accept that evidence based out the belief system which roots us to the ground and tells us we don't matter?

Why don't people speak their hearts?

I know the answer to this. People don't speak their hearts because they are afraid they won't be heard. Oh, it is agony not to be heard. It is agony to make yourself vulnerable, to pull back your skin and tell your truth. 

We walk around in the world holding back from the one person who needs to hear it most of all. We hold back from ourselves.

I said to Elizabeth a while back, Elizabeth, it's not so much about learning to tell me your secrets and your hurts and fears; it is about learning to tell yourself. 

So when I ask why don't people speak their hearts I don't mean to other people. I know the answer to that too. I know that people can't speak their hearts to anyone until they've spoken their hearts to themselves. 

I'm just telling you these things because I know them and you matter to me. You wear your heart on your face which is something I heard my boss say, instead of 'on your sleeve'. You show me a great deal. I am grateful for your trust. I am not afraid to tell you how I feel. I have no doubt that you know I love you but I don't think you've ever really grasped the why of it. I could be wrong but I'll say it anyway.

Dearheart,

Dearheart is directly translated from the Middle Ages as My Heart and you are that. I have never had a friend for this long. We found each other eleven years ago. Do you remember that? I have friends I've known since I was twelve or thirteen but we have not been close all these years. I have not even managed to stay married for eleven years. I have only managed to maintain a longterm relationship with my children. 

There was a time early in the friendship when we trusted each other enough to meet in the middle (ish). You were already carrying me then. You carried me for a long time. You carried me until I could stand up and then you walked behind me until you were sure I wasn't going to fall back down again. There is an angel from Cielo floating about somewhere (she got packed up to keep her safe when we started moving the bedrooms around). You pulled up beside that cabin in Frisco and about broke my heart. You accepted me exactly as I was, as my girls were, even as Ms. L. was. We were so broken. 

You crawled into your sleeping bag in that room with those two teenage girls because I couldn't leave Elizabeth alone at that point and I felt so damn bad about it and you just sucked up so much for me. You have to know these things. I knew it then and I know it now.

When I got home I felt safe for the first time since David walked out the door.

When you got to know me better you started to talk to me, maybe you trusted me to just listen, I don't know. You surely knew my politics and you surely knew I had a particular set of beliefs. We had a friend who knew these things too but she was pretty intent on either explaining them away or waiting for me to up and move south or see the light. You just talked to me.

You told me things you knew I didn't believe. You told me things I didn't agree with and you knew I could have argued with you or made you wrong or any number of things and if I managed to follow my intentions, then I just listened to you and if I missed the mark, I am truly sorry. I thought that you deserved to be listened to and just happened to think we all deserve to be listened to but since we are often surrounded by people who are like minded we don't have the opportunity to just listen to something that is real for someone else and shut our mouths in the process.

You know, you can validate without invalidating yourself and it's a crying shame we don't seem to understand that. I understood it theoretically until I met you and then I got it.

You spent a good long time just being with me and you smiled at me a lot and you were very gentle and then you talked and when I listened I heard a whole other world differently than I'd ever heard it. The most important thing I learned is that if we don't learn to listen we will go on as we are. If we don't learn to take the risk and talk we will go on as we are. 

I learned a whole new level of risk and compassion from you and taught that to my children who, completely unaware are teaching it by example. 

Because I could listen to you talk about God and because you were willing to listen to me talk about god, God, god, and God and play with the expression of what I felt, experienced, couldn't quite wrap my arms around, the depth of own personal spirituality has blossomed in a way which supports who I feel I need to be in the world and my ability to steady the ground under my feet when it is so very hard to listen and pick through all the noise because listening, for me is at the center of it. That is where my god, God, god, or God sits. There was a book by a man named Fynn called Mr. God, This is Anna. When Fynn is sixteen years old he finds four year old Anna on the docks in London in the 1930s and brings her home. Anna stays with his family for four years and in that time she has quite a bit to say. When he loses her he writes about it. My aunt gave me my first copy of this book, probably in an attempt to indoctrinate me when I was maybe twelve and it distinctly backfired if her intention was to pull me into the Catholic church or really any church at all. Anna had relationship with God. Anna did not have a relationship with church best I recall. I learned three things from that book that are still with me.

1. When you find someone wandering about on the docks in London looking like they might need a bit of care, just because the world says keep walking, maybe you ought to stop
2. People have a point of view. God has viewing points. (that is probably damn close to a direct quote)
3. If you love someone, they are in your middle, you are in their middle, nothing can ever change that, not time, not space, not anything.  'Where is Anna? Anna is in my middle' To someone very dear to me once after I'd given her the book: 'Where is Alecto, Laura? Alecto is in my middle.' Ten years later: 'Laura, where is Alecto?' 'Alecto is in my middle.' 'That is absolutely the truth.'

Einstein's belief that we are all part of a greater whole was something that came to me in my early thirties. He believed that the concept of separateness was truly false. If we understood the illusion of this belief I imagine that 1. we'd stop hurting each other (it's suicide, right?) and 2. we'd stand a chance of listening. I say, stand a chance because I notice we have trouble hearing ourselves.

So you listened to me first for a very long time and then I listened to you.

I still believe what I believe and you still believe what you believe and that is how it should be. There are SO MANY viewing points in the universe. I cannot imagine why on earth we would ever think there would or should be one. 

You carried me for so long and I don't think you have any idea what you did. And then one day I got to carry you. This is one of the most beautiful moments of my life. I'm truly sorry about your knee and I recognize that finding out about your knee was actually kind of important but you were hurting and that sucked. I'm sorry you didn't get to finish the course the way other people finished the course but I'm pretty sure by now you realize you finished YOUR course. 

I still cry when I look at this. 

Dearheart, I love you so much it hurts.

Now I'm going to let you figure out why the love letter is from Cielo. Shouldn't be too hard, you were just there. 

 

 

Monday, December 11 at 5:30 AM

I'm pretty sure the date is January 7. I am only aware of this because T's father said something ten days ago about eleven months and an alarm went off in my head. I thought I had more time. What does that mean, I thought I had more time? More time for what, exactly and why do I need time? I haven't got anything going on here. I put it away which is not the same as letting it go. I put it away because I thought it was important that I remember because dates are important to these kids. Six months was important enough that when they were separated because of a regatta he was upset and she may or may not have considered tears. She's funny that way. 

She has a necklace she's been wearing since he gave it to her. It's very pretty and understated and if she was going to wear anything at all it's exactly what she would wear. When he gave it to her she lost it immediately and she panicked. I would have panicked too and I thought, what the hell, kid, just tell him the truth.

No! I can't! I have to replace it, he'd be devastated! 

Knowing him better now I can see this is probably true. We drove to the jeweler where it was purchased. A bit high end for a fifteen year old. Huh. She thought the inlay was dark blue but it wasn't, she was assured. It didn't come in dark blue, it came in black and some other color and she wasn't sure they had any left but we went back to the cases to look. Given that Elizabeth thought it was dark blue suggests she hadn't even seen it in the light yet. Ouch. A tiny little thing on a sterling chain, it looked like a cross or a flower or something in sterling with an onyx inlay and it really was very pretty and settled flat against the top of her sternum. It cost her $78 to replace and he never knew. 

In retrospect he presented this thing way too early in the relationship and she did mention that at one point. February 7 is way too early and he didn't even wait until Valentine's Day, it was a one month anniversary thing and caught her off guard. He has not presented jewelry since and I expect she's relieved. Just that once. Every other gift has been dead on about Elizabeth including the sweater for her birthday which is exactly correct and I don't even want to discuss the soda making thing on my kitchen counter which is an Elizabeth toy if I've ever seen one. She doesn't exactly DRINK much soda but she sure does like to spray bubbles all over the kitchen. Syrup need not apply. She does not wear jewelry and has not taken that thing off. 

I thought I had more time. What does that mean?

I can't even identify the underlying feeling and I don't think it has anything to do with T directly although that landmine called one year in what has every indication of being a stable, healthy relationship would suggest that a right of passage has been crossed and I've possibly missed it. 

One year I missed the first day of school and she's still somewhat miffed. No, that's not right, truth is she's still put out. Nope. The word is angry. She is still angry. When I ask her about it and say, Elizabeth, it was eighth grade and just the one year and I was away with Portnoy she tells me, Mom, you barely knew him and you are ALWAYS with me on the first day of school in front of the rock.

What do you mean I barely knew him? We'd been together eight months?

No, you hadn't. You'd been together from the middle of February.

No. From the beginning of January.

You didn't actually see him until the middle of February and that's the only part that counts so that's six months. You ran off to Canada with a man you'd only seen on weekends for six months and left me in front of the rock by myself.

Elizabeth, I left you in front of the rock with your father.

Mom. Not the same thing.

The next year I rescheduled the trip to Cape Breton to be sure I'd be home in time and someone else was a bit put out. Someone else also failed to process the information and booked the trip incorrectly and it had to be rebooked.

But she has her father.

What part of this don't you understand? It's also her first year in high school. 

I have always been with Elizabeth when it mattered, even when I've been away or unavailable around those days.

When Lucia turned one I was on an airplane halfway across the country on the way to Phoenix. She didn't know. I cried. It sucked. There were a lot of times like those.

I hold on at the very end to these last days that matter so very much.

Elizabeth and I talked about her birthday for about six weeks as it approached and we looked at my schedule with the rotating weeks at home and thought about how she'd like to spend her birthday anyway. With me or with T or with both and she just didn't know. In the end it was settled for us given the project status and everyone else's schedule and she said she understood.

But that's not the same as you don't mind, is it?

Yes, but I understand.

Thank you.

In my head: fuck fuck fuck fuck I'm not even going to SEE her on her birthday this just sucks in so many ways. The last shoe hadn't dropped yet.

I went to the mall (I don't GO TO THE MALL AFTER THANKSGIVING) to pick up her birthday festivus solstice kwanikha new years, epiphany, fat Tuesday, ash Wednesday, lent (right, that's the same thing?) vernal equinox, easter, my birthday, may day, memorial day, summer solstice... I left graduation out of there because I have something else in mind... fourth of july, welcome to college gift  and it occurred to me that I could in fact see her on her birthday should I choose to get up at 4:50 instead of 5:00 and wake her ass up before I left for Basking Ridge.

I could in fact crawl into bed with my girl, hold her in my arms and tell her all the things I thought about while I walked in circles in the candle lit living room with Sailing to Philadelphia playing rather loudly in the background as I held a small pad of paper from The Castle with a pencil and marked my contractions as they came noting with ridiculous accuracy that I appeared to be playing chicken with the ten minute drive to Stamford Hospital, watching myself from the chest down every time I passed bedroom mirror leaning against the wall. 

I could in fact crawl into bed, hold her in my arms and tell her all the things I thought during that brief drive to the hospital and what I thought when her heart rate decelerated from the 140 BPM down to a terrifying 30 and the crash team burst into the room out of nowhere and the labor nurse put her hand up and barked: NOT. YET. WAIT. and rolled me over on my left side and her heart rate came right back up and my left side is where I remained for the next forty-five minutes. 

I could in fact crawl into her bed, hold her in my arms and confess that I was so terribly afraid I wouldn't love her enough, that there wouldn't be enough of me to go around, that the best of me was already used up in my twenties, that she would have to get what she really needed from her father and that the best I would be able to give would be kindness because my heart was mostly emptied. I would confess this and then tell her that the minute she was placed, slippery and wet, skin on skin, onto my naked belly, into my arms that my heart broke and none of it was true. I would remind her that despite the fact that I had to return to the office periodically during my seven weeks of leave including a brief trip to West Palm, with her and her father in tow, that I almost never put her down, car seat notwithstanding. I would remind her that the majority of those seven weeks were spent in bed or on the couch doing nothing but holding my girl, talking to my girl, nursing my girl, pumping more milk for my girl for the freezer, otherwise known as Gattaca. 

I could in fact crawl into her bed from 5:20 to 5:30 and remind her that I left for the hospital at on Monday morning at 5:30 AM on December 11, 2000 and that I returned the following day just past 1 PM. I could tell her I would be back a few hours late which was the truth. I returned on the 12th just before 7. 

The other shoe dropped this morning. 

Elizabeth will turn 18 on Tuesday, December 11, 2018 at 5:30 and she will be fast asleep and it will not matter where I am because there is a 90% chance that she will not be here. Elizabeth will turn 18 in a dorm. 

This was the last year. 

I did in fact crawl into her bed at 5:20 but I didn't say much; I'd already said most of what I needed to say. I just held her. I left two small gifts on her night table and I think I left her asleep enough that she didn't open them until later. I know she was sad later but T did a decent job with her birthday and we had a nice long FaceTime session in the kitchen with an inconceivable blue birthday cake. But she went to bed alone and I can't change that, can't make it up, and can't have it back. 

Also, there's nothing wrong here. Just a mom noticing the passing of time and lost opportunity and the rapidly diminishing things we all take for granted. The term circling the drain is what we use to describe somebody on the way out. There's nobody on the way out here. Childhood is circling the drain, that's all. Nothing wrong with that. I have to slap my hands periodically when I reach out and grasp where I shouldn't. 

I wonder if she knows. 

On Sunday, December 10 we went into the city, all of us. We met up with my brother and his wife because they happened to be there and we made the day about Elizabeth. We had brunch where Elizabeth was literally beside herself. We wandered through MOMA which is Elizabeth's Mecca I suppose for hours and gave up trying to keep eight people together after the first thirty minutes and wandered in pairs or in threes or one or two or five and bumped together and apart in front of Starry Night or the Assembler Code with poetry commented into the rows. We took the train back seated two by two on what at least half of us knew would be a standing room only train and ate cupcakes from Magnolia and were grateful for the seats. 

In the dark, T, and Elizabeth, and I shoveled four inches of heavy crud out of the driveway because the Prius probably wasn't going to cope with all that and prepared for Monday morning, December 11 at 5:30 AM. 

This is the only photograph I took of Elizabeth's seventeenth birthday and on or around December 11, 2017 when FaceBook gives me all the past years starting from 2008 there are so many but next year there will just be this one and the one above which is really a repost from last year when she turned sixteen. There is only this photograph because there are those rare days when everyone is entirely lost in the being and the phones or the cameras just don't come out. This photograph only exists because I thought to take it right before the train came because they will be married in July and he has been around long enough to be family and I just didn't have anything like this since no one took a damn thing at Thanksgiving either. When it got posted it was because it was a bad enough shot that it needed to be posted. I didn't realize there wouldn't be another.  

Ailish  Elizabeth, you were born sometime between 7:45 and 8 AM on Monday morning on December 11, 2000. No one really knows for sure because we were all too damn busy looking at you looking at me looking at you. I do recall that I was crying and that your eyes were wide open from the start. It's been seventeen years and I still cannot hear this without being back in that room with all those pillar candles and the ridiculous white carpet under my bare feet, and the mirror reflecting all that light into that cavernous room with the sixteen foot ceiling, and the paper and pencil back when I still wore the Raymond Weil watch your father bought me in Ireland, watching the seconds between the peaks fall away. I was calmer than any mother in transitional labor had any right to be. You were coming and I was ready.

 

(How to say Ailish: Ay, as in long A - lish with no hesitation between the A and the lish, there is no break between the syllables and for the LOVE OF GOD DO NOT STRESS THE LISH - this is how you say it. It is not Ay Leash, It is not Ah Lish, it is not Ay Leasha, It is not Ah Leasha. It is sure as shit not Eyelash, Eyelet, or Aylet and holy shit, NOT Turnish. Don't screw it up it pisses her off - if we spelled it correctly, Elis, you would have an excuse, but you don't a it's been Anglicized phonetically which is a damn shame. You all got used to Sean, didn't you? And most of you got used to Siobhan and that's a hard one. And then there's Mairead. There are a bunch of others as well but I think I've made my point. I won't likely be using her name directly again anyway but I figured if I was going to put it out there it would be best if it came with what turned out to be a much needed pronunciation guide. Poor kid.)

 

Our best possible selves

Tuesday, December 5, 2017

 

I wrote this post three times over the course of the weekend. I can't make it work. It wasn't just about Tuesday, December 5 and the calendar either. So what the hell, I'll just post the picture and you can make up whatever you want. Not all days look like this day. 

What I do know is this: How your life is in one place, it is in all places. 

Everybody's scared, sometime

I bought the dress to go with the boots because the conversation ended this way:

I can't really promise I'll be wearing a damn thing but I do promise to be wearing my boots and I do promise to show up on time. Once coerced, I stay coerced. You're scared, she's scared, I'm scared, looks like we're all scared. I will be there and I will be wearing my damn boots. 

At 2:45 Elizabeth and I headed to the mall. With my boots. Working backwards from a 7:00 PM arrival at Laura's house in Glastonbury and forwards from a 2:45 departure from the house and 25 minute travel time to the mall I had 45 minutes to come up with something to wear. This doesn't work when I'm in resistance to going in the first place and also not feeling particularly comfortable in my body at the moment. There isn't a really good reason for that because I have a ten pound swing in either direction and I haven't crossed the line where I'm likely to start feeling uncomfortable. It's not the reunion. I just feel this way lately. I'm sitting with it. Elizabeth says, don't say those words. Do you realize when you say those words you're hurting me? Right. OK. So I have 45 minutes to find a dress which matches my snake skin cowboy boots and I'm not feeling comfortable in my body.

Elizabeth:    So, Ann Taylor?

Me:    What? That's where I get my little black dresses, that or Brooks Brothers.

Elizabeth:    Well, yes, shouldn't you just fall back on the LBD when you're uncomfortable and have to go to an event? You do LBD very well. 

Me:    LBD and snake skin cowboy boots? For real?

Elizabeth:    Mom. Ditch the boots.

Me:    No fucking way. I am so done with LBDs. I am sick to death of the LBD. I am sick to death of looking like the wasp that I am. IT IS KILLING ME TO BE THE WASP THAT I AM AND I HAVE TO GET OUT OF THIS BOX. 

Elizabeth. Boots it is. Where do you want to go?

Me:    Anthropology or Free People?

Elizabeth:    No way! 

Me:    Why not? 

Elizabeth:    Mom. God. Mom. 

Me:    I'm going for slightly bohemian, OK?

Elizabeth:    Ohhhhh. OK, Free People it is.

We walked past Anthropology with their 50% sale sign and I came to a dead stop. Hard left turn in the door. Here is where I get lost. All this STUFF on racks. I know what to do at Ann Taylor and Talbots and Brooks Brothers, referred to as the Holy Triumvirate by Elizabeth's father. These are the cornerstones of my professional gear and purveyors of the LBDs. They can be counted on not to offer me anything with those holes in the shoulder. Anthropology and Free People can also be counted on not to offer me anything with holes in the shoulder as well but for different reasons. Anthro and FP would rather go out of business than even mildly sniff of conformity. The HT defines conformity from the other end of the spectrum. 

I stood in the middle of the well spaced racks and spoke to my daughter. Find my dress, Elizabeth, and like a truffle hunting pig she was off.

Can I help you? Is there anything in particular you're looking for?

She wasn't really expecting me to answer. Women like me say, no, I'm fine, thanks. 

I said, pulling up my jeans, I need a dress to go with these boots and I have approximately 33 minutes. I am a medium in this store and it needs to come off your sales rack OR not fall into the category of WTF.

Where are you going?

I'm going to a reunion.

Wilton?

No. Glastonbury. Thirty-fifth and I do NOT want to go. But I promised so I'm going and I've put this off to the last minute and I am NOT wearing a little black dress. Also, I have this awesome tattoo on my back so if I can expose that at some point that would be great. 

It only took 23 of those 33 minutes. Elizabeth and I went into the fitting room with a dozen pieces and I walked out with what might as well have been silk sleepwear which was nearly backless and a wrap - probably meant for gold sandals but the boots rocked it. There was no one in the room even remotely like me. As it turns out, this was important, or it mattered, or it was expected, or something like that. 

When it was time to leave the house after an entire hour of prep - pause - an entire hour of prep, I can't even fathom this. I haven't needed more than fifteen minutes of prep which includes drying my hair in more time than I can remember. An entire hour of prep. Granted, I moved slowly and a lot of those minutes involved the removal of the eight week experiment involving the lack of a razor with the exception of twice when I had to take a dry razor to the front of my lower legs when it just became too damn obvious through the front of the pantyhose. I wanted to see what would happen to my body, how I would feel about myself, what it would look like, you know, everything. What I wasn't counting on was how long it was going to take to remove it with a razor. 

Why did I remove it? All of it. I don't really know but I did. Wait. No. I do. I removed it to get back down to me. Regardless of your feelings on women and shaving, my experience of being covered in that amount of body hair felt like being covered. It didn't feel bad or wrong or make me feel less desirable or any of those things; it made me feel covered and in eight weeks that feeling didn't go away. When it was all gone I felt released. I'm just sharing that because it's interesting and because there's so much emotion associated with whether women shave or do not shave (I'm astonished, actually) I kind of wanted to put it out there in terms of it being a personal decision and a very personal experience which cannot have a right or wrong label associated with it. That conclusion was incredibly freeing. So yeah, it took me a long time to get ready but also I will admit to spending more time with the blow dryer than normal and spending more time in front of the mirror despite the fact that I applied exactly the same amount of makeup I ever apply with the possible exception of mascara. 

I took my time. Why? I think I wanted to see myself. I don't look anymore and it isn't because I don't want to, it's because I shave minutes everywhere I can possibly shave minutes and that is one of the first places minutes got shaved. 

In the end I stood in my daughter's doorway at 5:30 and said, Elizabeth, I am scared and Elizabeth said, I know, Mom but you know what, probably everybody is scared.

Me:    I doubt that very much.

T:    (through the phone) Mrs A, if you can handle the mom's in Weston, like for the last 12 years, don't you think you can deal with this?

Me:    T. You make a damn fine point.

T:    I generally do.

Me:    Easy there, T, it's not hard to take you down a notch or two.

T:    Mrs. A, please don't do that, I have to row tomorrow.

Me:    Just remember, T, I love you best.

T:    OK, thanks, Mrs. A. I love you best, too.

Elizabeth:    NO! YOU BOTH LOVE ME BEST!

Me:    OK, I have to go now. 

Elizabeth and T:    Be back by midnight!

Six of us left together from Laura's house after forty minutes of champagne with raspberries and generalized angst. No one has navigators anymore except me and in a no cell zone (apparently South Glastonbury is never going to have a tower) google maps just laughs in your general direction and says, good luck with all that. South Glastonbury is nearly as dark and windy as Weston. The angsty train followed me through the dark to the Glastonbury Hills Country Club where not one of us, despite having spent our entire lives in this town (except me) had set foot. When we parked we passed a white stretch limo. The extra long variety. Nice. 

I don't know anyone. I don't remember anyone. Glastonbury is a big, black hole. I know these people from Facebook but trying to match the live bodies to photographs is not easy. What I do remember are the standard cold spots of pain everyone suffered in high school to some extent or another. Those faces still pop up with names attached and as I walked through the entry another face popped up and I remembered him from before the shift when our fathers were umpires and I used to sit in the field watching the games looking for four leaf clovers and waiting to see if he'd come out and talk to me. He usually did. His father was on the force one town over which made him an oddity in a town like ours. He disturbed my equilibrium and I went to ridiculous lengths to appear in that field three miles from my house, willing to walk or bike home if that's what it took, sometimes without a single word. 

By the time we got to high school he had a girlfriend of the variety I wouldn't come into contact with for another six months and I said the wrong thing to the wrong people and found myself shoved up against a locker one day, my head hitting the metal so hard I had a solid lump for a week. When she was through scaring the shit out of me she offered me a piece of bubble gum, looked me in the eye and said, friends? Sure, I nodded and she said, but if you go near him I'll kill you.

I'd forgotten about Elaine as well. 

I know what happened to Elaine. Not pretty. Not pretty and unexpected and just sad and Laura stays in touch and hopes she'll be alright. She has found God and in her hysteria moves from church to church, one denomination after another, looking for some sort of truth to keep her off the bottle, off the needle, out of the pills but she can't get herself to a meeting to save her life and she cannot leave her husband who puts her in the hospital two or three times a year. Their daughter is in high school now and seems OK, whatever that really means, I'm told.

I remember this fierce girl in the hallway as I walk by the boy who has grown into a distressingly fine looking man and I smack myself for objectifying blindly. He looks startled as I pass, turns and watches and I walk into a very tall man who catches me in his arms and the moment is gone. The tall man grins and says, Alecto! I have no idea who he is. I read his name tag and I remember the name but I can't place how we ever would have interacted. He says, it's the eyes, Alecto, no one will ever forget your eyes. I smile and move past him.

The evening is like this. People seem to know who I am and I have no idea why. More men than women and one man does this thing across the table, he points two fingers at his eyes and then he points across the table at me and shouts over the band, it's your eyes, Alecto! I would know those eyes anywhere! How the hell are you! (Who the hell are you?) 

Later I am sitting with Laura and she is shaking and I ask her why. 

Laura:    I just so scared. Deedee is wandering around like a social butterfly. She says she didn't have any friends but she knows everyone.

Me:    She had friends, plenty of friends but she felt isolated for a lot of reasons, just like you did and just like I did. You had plenty of friends too. And I had friends. 

Laura:    Then why am I so scared?

Me:    Because you don't see it yet.

Laura:    What?

Me:    Well, when I walked across the floor to get food a while ago I looked over at the band and Toad was singing and he saw me and I realized he's always known me and I got this great smile because he was so happy to see me and I just let that in and then I kept walking and I realized everyone was just smiling and suddenly I was really just happy to be here. And on the way back I also realized that there's a pretty good chance that EVERYONE is scared. 

Laura:    What?

Me:    Why would it only be us scared to come here? Why would it only be us thinking we didn't have friends or that we were isolated during the most vulnerable time in our life? Look out there. 41 years ago most of us came together for the first time, from a bunch of different elementary schools into Academy for the sixth grade where we all became the class of 1982. This isn't really our 35th reunion, it's really our 41st. Do you have any idea how wonderful this is? How miraculous? How surreal? All of these people have had lives, good lives, not so good lives, maybe even mediocre lives, but lives and here we all are. There are people who live locally who aren't here. Do you think about why not? Maybe they are too scared to be here. Do you see that woman over there? That's Ellen. She's a walking train wreck but she's lucky to be alive and I'm glad she's alive. I know this because of what she posts and I just watch her. Her daughter had a baby last year and I think that's why she's alive. Do you see those people over there? They started ballroom dancing a year and a half ago because of my contra posts. She told me it saved their marriage. 

Laura:    crying. This is us.

Me:    Yes. This is us. Let's take a picture. 

Today that picture on top is Laura's profile picture. She is the girl in the white prom dress with the pink flowers from a few posts back. The girl I didn't get to see at the end of high school. She was my best friend for a few years, the girl who picked me up when I fell down and incorporated me into the circle of friends she'd forgotten she had. 

From our table near the band I watched the boy who became the man talking to the man who pointed at my eyes earlier. I wanted to talk to the boy who became the man so badly but I didn't want to interrupt what looked like an intense conversation. I told Deedee this was crazy, I wasn't even remotely shy anymore and wasn't so far away from having kissed a near stranger on the stairway at a contra dance, apparently shocking the shit out of him. I waited and waited and waited and suddenly he was gone. When I got up to look for him I realized he was entirely gone and it was only 9:30. Later my friend Michael told me it was his birthday and maybe he had somewhere to be. I told Michael to tell him if he saw him that I was terribly smitten the spring and summer of eighth grade but that I'd run off because Elaine threatened to beat me up in the hallway and I was terribly sorry I hadn't talked to him tonight and that I'd really meant to. Later on the way out I stopped to talk to the smokers and the smokers and thought, god, people still actually do this right outside the building. No, I do not want a cigarette and I definitely do not want a hit off of that, I have to drive and haven't you people heard of vaping? Yes, you have? Not going there? Less likely to get caught, you don't care? Old school. Well alrighty then. Wait. You do realize we're fifty-three, right? You are aware of how ridiculous it would look if we were actually arrested for getting high outside the Glastonbury Hills Country Club. Yes. We're actually counting on that.

Christ.

I didn't see as much of Deedee who has been Deirdre since college as I would have liked to but I'm OK with that. I saw enough of her and she was so happy after having been so scared. That she flew from England for this is astonishing I think. Although she thinks it is on par with me removing the rug from my body. She might be right although I do think it was time to reintroduce the razor. I just needed the catalyst. 

She is the girl in the red bathing suit next to me and I am the girl in the white dress with long blond hair from a few posts ago. Elizabeth said later, you have all aged so well, it's funny how some people do and some people don't. I said I didn't really know what it meant to age well. One woman said, we are all old now and I disagreed. I asked her if she felt old. She is a cyclist and is solid like a rock and says, yes, she feels old. I said, I think it's subjective. When I hike alone I don't feel old at all, I feel incredible but when I hike with someone who feels like leaving me in the dust, while I don't feel old, I do feel bad so maybe you need to try a perspective shift? 

The girl in the red bathing suit is also a cyclist. A long distance cyclist as in literally hundreds of miles over a period of days. I think there was one trip in Europe with a team when they did something ridiculous like 600 kilometers in three days. That's like 12 hours of riding in a day. I'm sorry, that is insane. Old people don't do that. You can be seventy-five and do that and by virtue of having done that you're not old, you're just seventy-five and there is something to be said for having lived seventy-five years. But let's just back up a bit and stick with fifty-three years. The rhythm and texture of fifty-three years of living cannot be duplicated, fabricated, accumulated by anything other than those fifty-three years. It cannot be collected in advance or on a fast track. You cannot be born with it. The grey in Deirdre's hair and the lines around my eyes, the skin at our necks, my teeth that have gone back out of alignment despite seven years of orthodonture, the changes in our bodies brought on from childbirth and the onset of menopause (I'm apparently the last to go and I'm not there yet FUCK YOU, BODY, GET ON WITH IT) are all indicators of lives being lived, physical age being accepted, embraced even (it is oh so easy to cover these things up these days, just throw some money at it, go under the knife, get used to the needle in the face, revisit the ortho dude, invest in dermabrasion, make peace with labiaplasty, etc) but they are not indicative of being old. 

By the time I left we'd opened the box called joy. 

And then I got home, early, maybe 11:20 because I'd promised to get home not too much past the new driver's curfew of 11:00 and be with Elizabeth who was clearly off when I got here. She told me a little bit. The night was just off, you know, she said, when you're all just short of hysterical, like Clara was rolling around on the grass outside, but you know underneath everyone is miserable. I admitted that I did understand. She said she had to go to bed early because she had an 8 AM shift. OK, that's fine.

When I opened my bedroom door I realized both cats had been shut in all evening which means one of them had probably peed somewhere out of spite. I swore and then let it go. I heard a bang and a shout and asked what was going on.

Nothing. 

I opened her door. I never do this. Privacy is really important. I might ask to come in but I don't just open the door. I opened the door. She was staring at her phone with tears running down her face. Her room was an unmitigated disaster. A disaster is fine, unmitigated means something is wrong. 

Me:    Why were you yelling and what did you throw?

Elizabeth:    I'm angry.

Me:    Why?

Elizabeth:    Because I locked the cats in your room.

Me:    Why be angry? They're just cats.

Elizabeth:    I don't know.

Me:    pushing her over, taking her phone, and sitting on the bed... There's something else, it's never just about cats in bedrooms. Move over, I'm going to lie down.

Elizabeth:    Take your boots off.

Me:    No. Just move over.

She was scared and shaking and angry and couldn't tell me why. She didn't know why. She didn't feel safe but couldn't tell me what she was afraid of specifically. I told her what I'd told John about how I protected her and the house and how I'd been doing this for years. I told her how I stopped outside her bedroom door before I went to bed and put my hand on the door for a moment to keep her safe. She asked why she never heard me. Because I'm very, very quiet. She asked if I'd already done it to the front door and when I said yes she asked if I'd do it again. I said yes. 

I held her until she stopped shaking and she told me she was just so tired.

Last week she dropped physics. Finally. But she is still so tired. It is more than school and more than work and more than just one thing. If I had to guess I would say part of it is having been alone so long and it's going to take her a while to decompress in the space of having me here more often but the other parts I'm not so sure. I thought about what I'd felt earlier in the evening, the memory of isolation and how it just is that way for so many of us. The conversation I had with her in the car when she talked about realizing she hadn't been flying under the radar at all these years after all when she and T were outed and she was slut shamed. No one is slut shamed like that if they don't have enough social status to be expected to fall in line. She didn't know she had it. Somehow this makes her feel worse.

In the fitting room all her friends seemed to be bailing on plans they'd made months ago for last night. She cried silently and I suggested she find another circle of friends, not a replacement but an addition. Find more friends, friends that will support you and T, friends that are social the way you are who will show up when they say they will and you won't feel abandoned because that really hurts you. She is afraid of rejection. I don't honestly think she'll be rejected. 

She is scared, my girl. Shaking and angry and she cannot tell me why. Today she is waiting for me to finish writing and be with her for a bit. 

There is another shot of her facing the same direction where the shapes of our faces are a bit more obvious and as she points out, if the lighting were different our hair would probably look the same. Makeup and hair has changed between 1981 and 2017 when these photographs were taken the summer between junior and senior years and she is eight months younger almost to the day but we both look like babies and while I don't look scared and sad in the photograph, what I had to say in the limited space under my photograph indicated a deep, cold well of isolation and fear embedded in the absolute belief that I was entirely unseen. This is not the photograph that will appear in her yearbook anymore than my mother would have chosen one of the more honest shots of me. I, on the other hand, had nothing to do with her yearbook selection but I did choose my own collection. 

Be well. Be at peace in yourself, in the world, in the universe. You are not alone, you have never been alone, and you never will be but it will feel that way sometimes more often than not and in those sometimes more often than nots there will be nothing anyone can do to make it right. That doesn't change the fact that you are not alone and never will. Be well. Be at peace with yourself and I'll do my best as well. 

 

 

You can share my hashtag

Well I have. Seen some weird shit. Weird being subjective or classifiable, I've seen all sorts of weird shit and I'm not often taken aback by the starkness of any one part of it; it all seems to bleed together the way you look at Dorothy sitting next to Alice and don't necessarily register right away that neither Toto or the suspiciously non-grinning Cheshire Cat belong anywhere near each other. Separate universes really, not even parallel. But there they are anyway in the same frame because Dorothy understands perfectly and Alice hasn't had time to catch her breath much less clarify her thoughts. Is it too much to ask to sit quietly and speak with like minded individuals who may remain entirely unknown because they've nothing in common other than one particular thing or event? 

Probably not.

You can ask.

I have to work to not actually live in a cave. This is the truth. Consider the logistics. The alarm goes off at 5 AM and I exit the house at 5:30. 

Le's pause. Please be duly impressed. In those thirty minutes a shower occurs, coffee is made and partially consumed (the rest of it travels) the suitcase is closed with the remainder of my stuff, I am dried off and dressed and fluffed (wet hair in the winter is going to be interesting, it will be ok I guess), everything I need is gathered (rolling red wheels, computer bag, and small knitting bag with two days of breakfast on top), small handbag and coffee, and I am in the car, nose pointed in the correct direction. Unpause. I really needed to share that accomplishment because 30 minutes alarm to car pointed in the correct direction is damned impressive. On this sort of schedule every single minute counts and you have no idea how easy it is to lose them. The minutes, I mean. Preparation and focus is everything.

Right, so in the car at 5:30 heading for Basking Ridge with a 7:00 AM ETA. I have the route down to 94.5 miles but 7 of them are on Route 53 which is a 35/40 mph state road running through Weston and Westport to the Merrit Parkway which I absolutely must hit before 6 which is when the early Stamford Clustermuck begins. Yes, really, that early. Drivers traveling Route 53 between 5 and 5:40 are traveling between 45 and 65 and they're coming out of Redding and they mean business. Drivers traveling the same route between 5:40 and 6 are doing the speed limit. It's astonishing. This literally changed my sleep cycle. I gave up 15 minutes of sleep to gain an additional 15 minutes of out of the car time. 

My best time so far, doing those 94.5 miles, 2 of which are off the exit and one of those is on campus, the last two tenths of a mile will ALWAYS require two full minutes to negotiate the parking garage ----- is 85 minutes. And I am traveling with the flow of traffic which means just above the median speed in the middle lane as often as possible.

Do you think I have the radio on when I'm driving like this? I do not. I am fully attuned to what's occurring around me. I am one with my second favorite organized aggregate in the entire world: highly motivated and interactive traffic (the first is the bee hive; they aren't nearly as behaviorally investing but they actually produce something and don't harm the environment).

The reverse drive is also interesting but a little more aggressive. Segment one: The Parsippany Crawl is a six to nine mile stretch of wait a sec, ok go, hold on, ok, no, stop, NOW MOVE, just kidding - OK GO NOW!!!, that takes about 35 minutes which is followed by 60 minutes of Segment 2: The Indy 500 where 45% of the cars doing their best imitation of the Indy 500 in and out of the oblivious left lane zombies who have come from somewhere and are going to points unknown. The Indy 500 crew are in it for the long haul, out of Parsippany and at least to the other side of the freshly opened on both sides brand spanking new Tappan Zee Bridge. There is a section of the Indy 500 where 287 meets the NY line at the intersection of 87 and things get weird and I do believe we all pray together:

Yea though I come barreling into the valley of interesting drivers, I shall fear no mishap; for Mario Andretti is by my side and his is the direct connection to the cerebral cortex of all Indy 500 drivers barreling through the valley of interesting drivers veering abruptly to the right at the very last minute in order to gain entrance to 87 East (might actually think it's South at this point) without dropping below the speed limit not even on the entrance ramp. Amen.

"If everything seems under control, you're just not going fast enough" - M. Andretti 

Segment 3: The Connecticut Line. I don't want to talk about it. This is when Mr. Andretti abruptly leaves my vehicle in disgust and I am alone again. He generally launches himself from all remaining Indy 500 vehicles at the Greenwich rest stop having no desire to witness the next 23 miles of what has now become know as The Douchbaggery Road. 

At no point would I even consider distracting myself with additional stimuli. No radio. No music. 

My drive to the office from the Hanover Marriott is brief and to the point. I don't make it from the bed to my car in 30 minutes but that's because I really don't have to. I make it in 40. I have nine miles of New Jersey goofiness to negotiate because it's a little later in the morning, not much but enough to make a difference and 15 minutes with the radio on would only be enough to confuse me. The drive back can take upwards of thirty and is actually part of the Parsippany Snarl so there's that. 

So. Access to news. I scan Facebook from the parking garage to my seat every morning. That's about 90 seconds. I notice that any other really early arrival is doing exactly the same thing. I asked some guy once what he was scanning at 7 AM. "My email and Facebook for news." "Damn, me too." He tells me it's the only chance he gets except for waiting for the individual cups of coffee to brew and walking to the bathroom and back and that can be a hallway disaster. I realize we're all doing exactly the same thing because in open work space no one scrolls through their phones, consultants don't do this much anyway. I do have a picture of our open workspace finally. I had to wait until 7 AM when really almost no one was present to take the shot. This is the Library table where the consultants, at least my local crew sit strategically placed dead center (more or less) in the middle of the room:

That's my red bag, looks darker than it really is but yes, it's dark, sitting over on my chair waiting to be unpacked and Jason's leftover water waiting for his return so maybe this was a Wednesday morning, yes it was because you can see my little container of yogurt plus the two bottles of hotel water which I have collected. The lamps are pointless and we wish they weren't there but maybe they're a good buffer. Aparna will join us on Monday morning and sit to the right of Jason who sits directly across from me and Bhaven, who is local sits to my left and desperately wishes someone other than me understood what a data lake was and if Ram ever comes back to the office (there's been some sort of vertigo problem for the last two months which has been wreaking havoc) he's going to end up on one of the ends. Max stays home. There is no way in hell a hard core developer would ever get any work done in this environment which is meant to be collaborative but is not. It is lunacy. Consultants are used to working in a war room and so our heads are down and we tune out what has become white noise, sitting up only occasionally when the table to the right (left side of the photo) periodically erupts in laughter. My boss, all the way on the other side of the room is eventually going to kill one of them. 

I am on the phone most of the day now and when I am not on the phone I am stalking Mike which is why I am in this office. At the end of the day I am not looking for news, I am heading for the door toward home and Elizabeth or the Hanover Marriott and Elizabeth and when I have had my share of Elizabeth I want white noise and something to do with my hands. I am on my fourth sweater and one of them is likely to fit someone. Sweaters for men is an odd sort of thing. 

Bhaven comes in at 8 and tells me when something awful has happened in the world. He tells me like this: 

Do you know what the body count is in LA? Do you know that the fires are totally out of hand? 

I google quickly.

Holy shit, Bhaven. I did not know. 

And then I get the international news. 

To his credit, Bhaven has never accused me of not caring or living under a rock. He has never presented the news as if I ought to know, only as if I probably do know and when I don't know he lets me catch up - as opposed to giving me the narration - and then we talk about it. I am quite certain he knows exactly what's going on. I am also aware that there are things he does not tell me. For example, I do not know what number 45 has been up to unless I check or back channel it by way of foreign issues or domestic events; in other words, what has number 45 done to upset the apple cart this time? Bhaven is very careful to keep that sort of thing out of it. He reports events mostly involving human casualty. There is no judgement communicated about how it happened. I find this guy refreshing; he is not bringing any sort of agenda into the conversation. He's just noting the human condition and acknowledging the tragedy. Some things he doesn't talk about. He has not mentioned what is occurring in Puerto Rico although we have talked at length about how long it's going to take for Key West to get back on its feet as well as what happened on Marco Island. 

Eventually I do get around to my Facebook feed which has started doing something odd. My notifications are shutting themselves down. I was getting notifications on maybe 30 - 45 people which gave me quite a list to plow through and some days I missed a lot of what was happening if, let's say, my kids decided to post six or seven entries each and if I happened to comment on something my notifications might blow up but I did my best to get through it anyway. I don't know how the mother's board determines which notifications I should see but that seems pretty random. You'd think I'd see my friend's posts but that's not always true. Now I'm down to birthdays, events, and responses to comment strings for a while. 

This is problematic. 

Initially I didn't realize I was missing anything until I opened my feed, prepared for a random scroll and saw this:

I had to go back to her page to get this and it has since been deleted and replaced but it started out this way '#metoo' and the emoticons were different. The quotes are there because I'm trying to avoid throwing another me too hashtag into the mix. If it had read the way it does today I might not have though much of it other than to maybe PM her and ask what the hell was going on. Normally this is vaguebooking and my daughter isn't guilty of it. The original post had tear emoticons which I later found particularly upsetting. I'm going to rename mine to get the hashtag out of there but right now it looks like this:

You can see this statement was posted in the middle of the afternoon on Monday, October 16. This never would have happened if I hadn't been working remotely. I wouldn't even have seen it until I was on my way to the car or in my room waiting for Elizabeth or I might not have seen it at all on my daughter's wall but I would have seen it elsewhere because by the time 7 PM rolled around it was just about all I saw in my feed. This isn't to suggest I wasn't working my ass off on Monday. It just means I'm working at my dining room table and if I have five minutes between calls and I need to catch my breath I'm probably going to use those five minutes to look at my life, a good bit of which can be found running through my feed. Also, I was sick as hell which has me wondering just how much that had to do with my response mechanisms. For me sick = tremendously vulnerable, especially if I'm home by myself doing everything I can to stay focused on the fires in front of me - as opposed to falling face first into the keyboard. 

I only had to scroll a bit to find out what she meant by me too and because she'd been brave enough to do it, I did it too, more in solidarity with my daughter than anything else. If you're going to stand up publicly and make that sort of statement at 26 then your mother, who went down hard at 17 had damn well better stand with you having spent most of your life telling YOU to stand the hell up. YOU, who also went down at 17, not nearly so hard if you're going to judge by a narrative but going down is going down and as I said later in defense of the hashtag, we don't get to judge the extent of another woman's hurt. 

Later I wrote something in response to one of Sparky's daughters who asked if it was wrong to feel grateful for not having a hashtag and I said, no, it isn't but it is indicative of where we are that this pathos even exists. I wrote that as my daughters grew up I had two parallel conversations in my head, three really: 

1. The ask: Please, God, oh please don't let my girls be part of that statistic. Please let them be outliers.
2. The surrender: When will it happen? How old will they be? How much clean up am I looking at? What will be left to salvage? (yeah, try that one on if you haven't already)
3. The negotiation: Please, maybe it will be just a small thing. Please let it be just a small thing. 

Well. That just stopped the conversation dead in it's tracks. The late thirties, early forties, financially secure, married working moms maybe just five years past their Burning Man years with one or two small children in the San Francisco Bay area are not ready for that sort of shit to hit home quite yet. Hell, I wasn't ready for that sort of shit to hit home quite yet. I hadn't really uttered the words; they'd just been floating around back there for years: The Ask, The Surrender, and The Negotiation. 

Later I was talking to Elizabeth about this and how I felt guilty for being grateful for having one safe girl (still) and she looked at me, diametrically opposed emotions doing battle on her face.

Elizabeth:    Mom. You don't have a 66% hit rate. 

Me:    What do you mean?

Elizabeth:    Mom. The hashtag is for everything from sexual harassment to rape. You said so yourself. You've written no less than four diatribes defending the use of the hashtag by victims of sexual harassment based on what it does to their experience of themselves in the world. 

Me:    I know. 

Elizabeth.    MOM! What the fuck?!

Me:    Oh my god. I have a 100% hit rate.

Elizabeth.    Yes. You. Do. Remember Branford? Remember that Asshole who stalked me up and down the line? Remember the way he danced with me? Remember what happened when you and Portnoy told me it would be OK to tell the caller and he would take care of it? Remember what happened when the caller tried to take care of it? Remember what they all did? Remember how they left me in the corner and let that guy scream at you? 

Me:    I know. I'm sorry.

Elizabeth:    Do you know how that makes me feel? Not just about what happened but about what happened when I trusted you and Portnoy and trusted the caller and then all my friends let me down. 

Elizabeth:    Do you remember what happened in Hartford? Do you remember in the car when I told you what that guy did and begged you not to tell but you did anyway? Do you remember what they did? Do you know how that feels? Do you think I'm ever going to tell anybody anything ever?

Me:    Jesus Christ, Elizabeth!

Elizabeth:    And finally, do you remember the guy who stalked the shit out of me at Round Hill Contra and how Carol let that guy stay even though he was chasing all the women away? You think I don't remember this? I remember this because of how long and hard you fought it and then how you walked away and never went back. You have a 100% hit rate. I don't feel safe and I don't think people will help me. I think women are more dangerous then men when it's over. 

Me:    {just crying}

Elizabeth:    OK, Mom, listen, I don't really want it to be this way. And you know I'd fight, right? But this really screwed me up. People suck in a lot of ways more than the world will admit. Have you read all those posts written by the people who think sexual harassment shouldn't have a hashtag?

Me:    Yes, Elizabeth, that's why I kept writing about why they should. 

Elizabeth:    You know this thing about Contra where they used to say that thing about getting a new woman in your arms every thirty seconds?

Me:    Elizabeth, they really don't say that anymore

Elizabeth:    But, Mom, they mean it. 

Me:    Elizabeth, it's hard to change a culture, it's like turning a battleship; it moves slowly but it gets there.

Elizabeth:    Contra dancers are really fucking disgusting.

Me:    Wow. Did anything ever happen up North?

Elizabeth:    Not directly but the last couple of times I was up there it was starting to get weird and you know what? I wasn't even fifteen yet. 

So here's what happened finally, by the end of the second day when I realized I had to get the hell off Facebook for a while. 

There were too many. I always wondered what it would be like to stand up in solidarity and look around and find myself not alone. I thought it would feel better. I thought it would make me feel strong. I thought it would look like a wall of women and men, yes, men too, a wall of women and men - and here's my mistake - strong women and men and we would feel stronger and maybe safer because of this unity and maybe we could make a difference and other people could stand up and finally maybe, people would listen differently.

That's not what happened. OK, maybe that's not fair. I really don't know what happened because in the end I didn't stick around long enough to find out but given the removal of the hashtags something happened. 

I felt like I was riding the crest of a Tsunami, not so much standing on the shore waiting to be engulfed, but riding the crest waiting to be turned and tumbled, lost in this abyss-like darkness, heavy water and silt filling every available cavity. I bled water and silt from my eyes and ears, vomited it up onto the wreckage and felt the bloat in my uterus which cannot decide if it is quite through with it's child bearing years or would go on a while longer, catching the occasional ovum tossed willy nilly down one tube or another on random months. I briefly suspect a surge in progesterone brought on mass hysteria, mostly women wailing in a single voice which I have realized is in a pitch that cannot be heard by the uninitiated. 

We are not a strong wall. We are a massive collection of men and women who harbor the secret, or not so secret guilt of our brokenness. We typed the words '#metoo' or Me, too or metoo or me too in our statuses with hope or fear or anger or all of the above but mostly to be heard, to stand up in solidarity and I do not believe that any of us really expected the backlash. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe a great many of us expected the backlash and did it anyway. Maybe the only the damaged really experienced the reaction as backlash. I don't know. I do know an awful lot of statuses came down. They filled my feed on Monday. It was all I saw. From women and some men, just those two words with or without the # and some with an explanation and the ask to copy and paste the explanation. And then in my feed I saw the rebuke. Some came from women, some responses were from men defending the hashtags. Some were from men apologizing from past acts or for men as a whole. A good many were from men just reacting. If 100% of the women have been sexually assaulted, even if you're counting harassment, does this mean 100% of the men have done something wrong, one man writes. No, that isn't what it means but the damage is done.

Post after post by men and women about why the hashtag should belong only to victims of rape. Comment after comment by me about why that is not true and why I will share my hashtag with ANYONE who has been hurt and had their experience of safety in the world damaged such that the choices they make are altered forever. A hurt is a hurt, I tell them.

So this. I'm just going to say this.

If I take my rape which was truly a brutal thing. If I gave you the intimate details of what happened that night to my seventeen year old body face down on the white carpet on the dining room floor with the muzzle of the gun at the back of my neck, if I gave you the intimate details of the conversation that occurred before, during and after between my thirty year old rapist and my seventeen year old self which degraded who and what I was in such a way that I still wonder if I'll get it all back and at the same time had me mostly focused on working out how to convince him not to put a bullet in my skull. If I gave you the intimate details, which I have NOT, by the way, you would surely turn away. I don't know that you would read all of the words. I have never spoken them, I have never written them. My parents do not know, the police do not know, no man I have ever been intimate with knows. Only me. 

If I take my rape which was truly a brutal thing and I compare it to a fast and dirty up against the wall in an alleyway and then he's gone and she's left breathless and broken on the ground littered with alley trash, forty feet from her car and safety, can we call these events the same thing? Can we?

You bet. There is absolutely zero difference. She is just as broken as I am. Just as afraid for her life, just as changed, just as wishing she could rewind her life and wipe it away as I am. 

Because once that boundary is crossed, it is crossed. You can continue to do damage to varying degrees and I suppose you can make it an entirely other thing with kidnap and then that is an entirely other thing to contend with but the boundary of rape is just exactly that. Your power as a woman, or a man, but primarily a woman in this world has literally been ripped from you, body and soul and good luck getting it back. Your sexuality has been removed, torn, dirtied, and shoved back in sideways. The world is literally going to look at you like you committed a crime. You are bad. So it doesn't matter to what degree. Same hashtag.

Sexual harassment. Here's one of my favorite examples. Twenty-three year old intern, bright girl is on the fast track to something and she reaches out to a superior, maybe just slightly superior male colleague for help. She is too young to have figured out how to negotiate the crap that goes on with men in the workplace. His behavior toward her is aggressive, it isn't even clear what he's doing but she's uncomfortable, she wrap words around it and she's scared. She feels less than, somewhat dirty. She wonders about what she's wearing. She stops going to him for help and her project suffers. She looks around for help elsewhere but in the back of her mind she is afraid. 

Do have any idea how often this happens?

The career track she was on just got derailed and she doesn't even know why. He's not even clear that he did it because in our culture it's OK to do this shit. 

If she's lucky, somebody sees what's happening and picks her up because that brain is too good to waste and she's back on track but that little niggling voice in the back of her head will always be there. If she's strong she finds a way to get past it but it will always be there. Once that boundary has been crossed it cannot be uncrossed.

And here. Here is the worst part in the world. This is what the voices are saying. They are women speaking, not men. The women are saying this: Snowflake. God, that was NOTHING, you should have seen... Baby. Suck it up. Oh grow the fuck up. If she can't grow a spine, she doesn't belong here. Clorox in the gene pool. Daddy's girl. Waste of oxygen. She had it coming. Did you see what she was wearing? Slut. Do you think she blew him? That door was shut.  

I shit you not. I. Want. To. Punch. Someone. 

So. How were those boundaries crossed in the first place (yes, they were crossed twice, once by the man and then again by the women)?

They were crossed because we are still raising our girls to be obedient and we are still raising them to believe it's their fault (dress codes, boys can't control themselves), and we are still not believing them. We are still teaching them to question themselves. We are still teaching them to be tolerant. We are still teaching them that men are superior. We are still teaching them that anyone in a position of authority can pretty much do whatever they want to us (refer to my lawyer Arlo what's his name who, in the interest of making sure I could follow direction when given direction under any circumstances, locked the office door, pulled down my jeans and put me over his knees before I finally reacted and ran the fuck out of his office and when my mother called her lawyer friend we were told he did it all the time but getting him disbarred was going to be a real challenge). We do not actively teach them how to identify what's happening much less how to address it. Portnoy taught me how to identify a microaggression which is term coined to identify racist behavior but can easily be applied to any act where privilege and power apply in everyday life (Arlo's act was NOT a microaggression) . Microaggressions have been pounding us into the sand for decades. We cleaned up the big stuff but continue to do major damage with the underlying conversations. By the way, we are all guilty of these things and they can be really hard to uncover but once seen they're really hard to unsee. 

So. Damage. That was a microaggression and sexual harassment runs the gamut from that (or less visible) all the way up to just short of penetration which is when we're allowed to call it rape.

Damage that has us unable to make the choices we might have made otherwise. Choices that are life altering.

You can share my hashtag. I swear to God it's big enough for all of us. 

In the end I had to bail. It was too much. I don't really know how I feel about this. Bad, for sure. When you find yourself, after 36 years saying, Fuck, stop it, no, just no, enough, I can't really cope with this much pain - I don't really know what to do with this. On Thursday I thought I'd crawled into a cave and was never going to come out or talk about it again or pay attention and maybe just pray that my girls' statistics didn't go up. I thought maybe I was just going to stop giving a damn about whether or not anything ever changed because I really didn't think it would. I figured if Portnoy the self-proclaimed feminist could still have misogynistic tendencies then there was really no hope.

However, this morning I decided that if I could forgive Portnoy's misogynistic tendencies on the grounds that he is, after all 60 (you do kind of have to take the cultural background into account), and he is after all, or I think he is or I thought he was, trying NOT to have misogynistic tendencies then maybe I could start from there and start working out some faith again. Portnoy's really not the best example given some of the circumstances but he's a start primarily because he IS 60, he IS a self-proclaimed feminist (which I don't believe in, by the way, I accept allies but not feminist males, you kind of have to be a woman but whatever that's my stuff I have to kind of hear him as he's talking) and that particular demographic is often the most difficult to deal with because they have all the baggage of their generation plus they think they're right. So when one of those guys makes a damned good effort to change shit, his own shit, never mind the whole of it, just what he's working on, then that's got to be enough reason to stand up and start looking for more of it. 

So, yeah, all that. In the end it boils down to this though:

You can share my hashtag. I swear to God it's big enough for all of us.

 

and you thought this post was about Mario Andretti and open workspaces. 

 

Time is the only thing you have

2008 was the year she left Bear Stearns, turning her back on a twenty-two year career in which she took one of the most appallingly male dominated industries of all time by storm, having first stayed at Drexel Burnham Lambert until the bitter end to unravel the derivatives fiasco before moving on to drive Bear Stearns into the stratosphere. She is described as the ultimate control freak, running a department of one hundred and fifty and pushing the Bear Stearns derivatives trading volume up by 70%. If you do your homework, a couple of keystrokes ought to bring up her name. She was alone in the stratosphere and is quoted as saying something to the effect of, it was bad in the eighties but it's gotten better.

Right. I remember the eighties in a male dominated industry. It bloody well sucked and certainly has a great deal to do with the sheer lack of tolerance I have for any sort of questionable male behavior at all. I don't believe for a minute that my world came near measuring up to the jungle she must have hacked her way through by some miraculous combination of raw horsepower, political acumen, sheer perseverance, possibly a rhinoceros skin and horn to match, and hutzpah - also known as beachball size lady balls. 

I had exactly one interaction with the woman. One. One interaction with the woman with zero knowledge of her history, which is a shame because it would have changed everything. It would have changed how I heard her, it would have changed how I responded, what I said to my daughter after the fact. Everything. But how could I know? She was just another Weston mother making what I considered an unreasonable demand which in a split second I classified as a battle just not worth fighting. 

I don't know how many children you've had and I don't know how much education, but your brain cells clearly went out with each placenta and you have sold your soul, your brain, your mind and there is no reasoning with you. I will give you what you want, work with my child, and for the love of god I hope you go away and never come back. 

I imagine this interaction occurred exactly one year after she walked away from Wall Street. All that energy like a laser on three children, one in fourth grade, two in middle school, directing, touching, embracing, protecting lives, thoughts, experiences; making up for early years flashing past the windows of the Metro North commuter trains. To get to Wall Street before the opening bell you can take the 6:10 or the 6:30 out of Westport. As a managing director, maybe you should take the 6:10 so you're going to leave your house at 5:42 which is three minutes before I leave for Basking Ridge on Mondays and Wednesdays and I arrive at 7:30 which is before she will arrive downtown. She will stay until 8 most nights. You can do the math backwards. Those kids were sleeping on either end. She was not sleeping much at all. 

Pause. If this were Daddy we would not blink. We would think, gosh he works hard. But this is Mommy. We, the jury have in an instant tried, convicted, and hanged her until dead for the crime of abandonment because her vagina says... yeah, you know, and if you so much as went there, even for a second, fuck you too. 

So when four little girls decided to trade Christmas presents and came up with a $30 budget which I immediately kiboshed because we did not HAVE $30, my nine year old didn't really have the wherewithal to tell her friend that she wasn't going to be able to participate and that $30 stuffed puppy involving some sort of pillow wasn't going to happen. Instead the unthinkable happened and one little girl received nothing. I wasn't paying attention, or not enough attention. I'm not really sure in retrospect how I should have handled this because I still stand by my belief that $30 is way too much money for nine year olds to be budgeting for a Christmas gift swap. The question was how it was handled. My nine year old really did not have what it took to tell her friends that $30 was too much. Instead she let the freight train of disappointment happen the day before Christmas break and said nothing. 

The phone rang. This is the part that blew my mind I suppose. The girl's mother. This isn't fair, she said. I wanted you to know, she said. I would want to know, she said, if my daughter had made a promise and not kept it. 

This is where I decided to throw the towel in. Brain cells. Gone. Not gonna get it. Entitled kid. Seriously out of touch mother. Christ on a bike. OK, listen, I completely understand. I think she forgot. I understand her disappointment, that's absolutely terrible. I'll get it taken care of immediately. Don't worry, she'll have the puppy first day back to school. Not soon enough? OK. We'll drop it off. No, of course I don't want her to cry. I'll take care of it on my way home from work. Yes. I work. I'm at work now. When do I come home? Um, pretty late most nights. Walmart is open on my way home. Uh, I can wrap it in the car, sure. Do you want me to ring the bell or just leave it on the steps? No. I'm sorry, I'm not going to go home and get her first. No. I'm not going to do that. She's with her sister. No, I'm not going to make her sister do it either. I understand she's that upset. OK, listen. I'm really tired. I'm a single mom, I've got two kids at home still and I really want to make this right but you have to understand this is the best I can do. 

Right there the conversation changed. She backed off like she'd been shot with an elephant gun. First day back to school would be just fine. She sounded like she was going to cry. Then she said she'd get it. I said no, I'd do it. Elizabeth will bring it. I was totally confused. She went from being an absolute bully to sounding confused, unsure, and suddenly compassionate. I had no idea what to do with this. 

We never spoke again. Elizabeth's relationship with the girl was dissolving because Elizabeth was slowly being cut from those particular social circles having made the choice to be nice no matter what. As the years progressed we tracked this girl and other girls and I remember when this girl hit middle school she was one of the girls in sixth grade who discovered cosmetics first and plastered them all over her face. It's a right of passage and there is always a wave of girls who go first. It is always a shock to the system because in fifth grade they look like babies and in sixth grade when their class photos are taken at the end of September they are suddenly just shy of eighteen and you want to take them to the bathroom and redo their eyes for them. By the time freshman year rolls around they have found their true faces which may mean more color or less but it is always different, always a signature of their own. This girl was the biggest shock for me. I don't really know why. Maybe it was her mother who I believed would never have allowed her daughter to have climbed so far out of the box. I didn't understand. 

Later, maybe halfway through their junior year, when Elizabeth said, look, Mom, look what is happening, we watched the photographs over time while the body fat dropped from her perfectly healthy body, hollowing out her face, eating away the muscle and turning her once strong cheerleader legs to sticks. Her arms hung from her blue and gold Senior t-shirt in September, gold wisps of hair still long past her shoulders. 

Elizabeth, why? What is happening?

I don't know, Mom. 

Is she cheering this year?

No. I don't think she can. 

Is she sick?

I don't think so, at least not in a diagnosable way other than she's not eating. 

She looks so happy in all these photos. All her friends look so happy. Everything looks so normal. Except her. She looks so wrong. Doesn't anybody think anything is wrong?

I don't know. 

Last night I was scrolling through my Facebook feed on the Mom's board looking for something, I don't recall what. 

I see these posts periodically. Town families needing help for one reason or another. It might be a temporary sort of thing, someone is sick or out of work or a tree has fallen through their house (if trees have recently fallen through 20% of the houses in town this is nothing to remark on), or a not so temporary thing, someone has cancer, or a tragic thing, someone's son has died in a car accident or someone's daughter or an overdose away at school, or a middle school boy has broken his skull on a stone wall in a bike accident, or it might be something unspeakable in which case it gets a different sort of post. The unspeakable category is when the son of the intermediate school's media assistant has been arrested for killing her and her husband (his father) and dumping their possibly chopped up bodies in hefty bags in the bushes of an abandoned house and also when a local mom has dumped a few gallons of gasoline over her head and lit herself on fire in the parking lot of the closest to town public ball park. Anything other than the last two egregious items get a meal train if the family is well enough known. It starts out like this:

Friends - many of you have reached out to see how you can help with the xxx family...

Which is followed by a 200+ comment post which is followed by a meal train post which gives instructions on how to deliver food to the family and what not to deliver if there are allergies. 

If you follow the 200+ post closely enough, you might work out what's happened. You also might not. It is entirely possible that if you don't know the family and the friends have closed ranks you will get absolutely not one freaking word and have to start googling for clues. If the situation falls into the egregious it's open season and you'll get everything including trial links. In the case of the gasoline I don't know what happened because I wasn't a member of the board yet. It probably didn't exist yet.

It was the fifth entry down. I had to read it twice because I didn't recognize the name. I recognized the family name. If I had just gone to the kitchen and picked up the PTO directory from last year I would have had an immediate answer but it was late. I am not particularly hopeful when I google a name these days. Most people are becoming significantly less searchable as we become more aware of our privacy or lack thereof and get better about protecting it. I didn't expect to find anything. I didn't expect the name to be particularly meaningful either and I'm not really sure why not. The hubris in my belief that every woman takes her husband's last name and every woman gives up her identity and every woman has nothing to show for her life around here and therefore will not present a damn thing in a search engine is a bit disturbing.

She came right up. All over the place. I read, and read, and read. I read about an astonishing career beginning right out of college. I read an article called 40 under 40 which asked, where is she now? Nothing mentioned children, a husband, a home. Nothing. Then I got up and went to the kitchen for the PTO directory and there she was with her very own name carried over from her very own life which had not a damn thing to do with her husband or quite honestly anyone. A life in which she did manage to get and remain married and produce three children and finally after twenty-two years for whatever reason tossed in the towel. I can guess that the majority of the population will state, as her LinkedIn profile suggests that she did it because she'd rather be a mom. Or that she just couldn't take it anymore. Or that she felt she finally had to make a choice. My guess is we won't be able to just say, she up and quit her job. Or we won't be able to say, she played hard enough she hit the wall and just like with the boys, she might have gotten herself tossed. My guess is we'll have to play the mom card for her. We will do that before we will even think to do the math called the 2008 Bear Stearns prelude to the risk management meltdown at which point she would have turned left, Bear Stearns would have turned right (into JP Morgan Chase). 

I wish we would not do that, play the mom card. It's dishonorable. Only she knows the how and why of the arc of her life which ended, based on what I can tell, rather abruptly yesterday. Something like 24 hours ago.

At 11 PM I decided I should probably tell Elizabeth. I sent a text as well as a screenshot of the existing comments (there weren't many yet). I thought it would be better if she had some time to process the information before she went back to school on Monday and the entire world was buzzing with it in one form or another. 

When they were in seventh grade the mother of one of her friends from her earlier life (pre-mean girls) passed away unexpectedly. The fallout of the death became a town upset because the father was the grandson of a once very famous very wealthy hotel magnate dubbed the Queen of Mean. The Queen of Mean hated the father's mother with enough passion that in 1982 when the father's father (the Queen of Mean's only child) died, the Queen of Mean evicted them from one of the family properties. When the grandson married, the Queen of Mean's distaste was so great that apparently all hell broke loose and they were cast from the family (not sure what was left, other than dogs, of the family at that point). When Momma died suddenly the Queen of Mean started raising holy hell. I don't know what sort of holy hell was raised, I just know it was holy hell and did significant damage to the two girls one of which became the massive bully who got so out of control that Emily G had to leave school after the eighth grade and go entirely elsewhere. Elizabeth assures me that the Queen of Mean's great granddaughter has settled down. Somewhat. I'm not sure how settled because I found her posing as an adult on the Mom's board and turned her into the admin back at the end of 2014 but I suppose it's been a few years and I ought to cut the kid some slack. 

(post script on the queen of mean - I did some digging on this - it had to have been a great aunt because the queen of mean dropped dead in 2007. However, the case is closed on this and nobody is willing to talk about what happened that year other than to acknowledge that yes, there was indeed family havoc wreaked which suggests that the title was passed on - the girls are sheltered and I suppose they ought to be)

As a twelve year old, Elizabeth took the first death in stride. I don't think she processed it directly in correlation to her own circumstances and her own mother. When she was five and David's brother died she had a brief meltdown which lasted all of two or three months while she processed the concept of death and decomposition and the difference between body and self and the possibility and eventual reality of loss. That is an awful lot for a five year old to bite off and chew and I had no idea how to stop the process once she'd taken it on so we just rode it out with her and eventually she made some sort of peace with the information.

So. We become trees. 

I didn't say that.

But we could become trees.

Yes, if you are buried in the ground and a seed is planted above you and the seed turns into a tree you, also will be part of that tree.

What if you are buried in a box inside the big cement box in the ground?

Then nothing will happen to you. You will decompose into a puddle and just stay there unless the thing is airtight in which case you will just dry out.

And you go nowhere?

Unless someone digs you up.

Why would someone dig you up?

We are running out of room to bury people. Someday people are going to want the land back (keeping it real in the 21st century). They are just empty bodies, Elizabeth, it is OK.

I would rather be a plant. 

OK.

What do you want?

I would rather be a plant too (it was too early to explain to my daughter that I want to be lit on fire in the middle of the ocean).

Tears. I don't want you to die.

I'll do my very best not to die for a very long time, OK?

But you're going to die.

We are all going to die. It's OK. That's the way it's supposed to be.

Why couldn't I see Frank?

We've talked about this. Frank was in a closed casket because Frank had already started to decompose. No one wants to look at a decomposing body. 

David got to look.

No he did not. David got to look at a photograph and no one thought that was a very good idea. It was a very scary photograph.

Did you see?

Yes.

What did he look like?

He didn't look like Frank anymore.

Why did you look?

So that David wouldn't have to be alone when he looked.

Was he scared?

Yes.

Were you scared?

No.

Why not?

I don't know. I just wasn't. Frank wasn't my brother and I'm not really afraid of death the same way. I might have been scared if it was my brother. I don't know, Elizabeth. 

What did he look like?

Awful, Elizabeth, he looked just awful. It was really sad. It was sad because he was alone for so long but I guess it didn't have to be sad because once you're dead, you're dead so really it's just sad for us. He didn't look like Frank anymore.

At the graveside Elizabeth tried to jump into the grave and onto the casket as we passed by, each of us scooping up the ritual bit of earth to drop in on Frank. I grabbed her by the scruff of her bright blue Madeline cape and held her dangling, legs kicking over the pit while she shrieked, I want to see him! I want to see Frank right now! I took her directly to the car and we waited for the rest of the family to complete the ritual. Tears and earth and grubby hands and this I remember best about her; the concept of propriety just wasn't there, it didn't matter. All that mattered was getting answers, seeing Frank, understanding, reaching, touching, embracing life, death, and everything. And this is maybe why she could take off such an enormous bite, chew it up, swallow, process and then let it be.

But life has lifed and she has battle scars and a great sense of propriety and boundaries and unasked and therefore unanswered questions and her relationship with this girl is distant with a fine silver chain made of memory and concern and some distant sweetness and her relationship with me is similar to that of my relationship with Lucia in her final years of high school. They struggled differently but their sudden need for their mother escalated as they approached graduation. Elizabeth's vulnerability becomes more apparent as she finds her voice and every week a new truth is revealed, some new fear or revelation, or concern, or question and as she speaks she turns to face her own truths and says, I know that you will catch me if I fall. And I say, of course I will.

So now I tell her that just suddenly, out of the blue her friend's mother is gone.

Just that evening we had dinner and talked about age and that this thing is a state of mind. This came up because I said I didn't consider 78 old. I said that because she asked how old my father was. So, therefore, this is not old. Without being asked, I said, I don't think you get to old until you're 90 but maybe when I'm 90 I won't agree with that. She told me that old was a state of mind and she wished I would just not go to that place. I said that I had no intention of going to that place because I expected way too much of the world. 

What does that mean?

That means that things are changing so fast my head is spinning and I need to know these things. I just found out what a data lake really is, I knew in theory but I couldn't really wrap my head around it until just this week when Bhaven and I sat down and really talked about it. 

So why does that matter?

Well there are so many things associated with data lake, the concept of data lake and the implementation of data lake and all the pieces parts and I have to get my hands into this.

So then what?

Well after that there will be about nine million other things that will have happened and I will need to touch and know and learn those things too.

Why?

Because they're damned exciting, girl! The world is exciting! I don't want to miss any of it!

Don't you want to retire?

Hell, no! I will miss too much!

Won't they make you retire?

Not if I'm really, incredibly valuable. I suppose if I stop being really, incredibly valuable then no one will want me anymore but if I keep learning new things really fast and figuring out how to implement them and if I can drive innovation then maybe they will let me stay and keep playing. Elizabeth, maybe no one will think I've gotten old if I haven't actually gotten old. 

I don't want you to die.

Oh. Well, I will.

When?

Not a clue. Probably in the middle of data lake somewhere.

Not funny.

She did not take this particular death well at all. There were a few too many oh my gods on the other end of the text message. In the end, and I recognize she was tired, she asked me if there was anything in the refrigerator. No. There is nothing in the refrigerator. It was just delivered. It's still coming up to temp and I haven't cleaned the surfaces yet. Why do you want to know if there's anything in the refrigerator?

Yes or no, Mom?

I already said no.

Are you sure?

Um. Yes. I'm very sure. Would you like a picture?

No. I just want to know you haven't put anything in the refrigerator.

Are you afraid I'm going to lick the surfaces?

....

I'm not going to lick the surfaces.

Would you please wash the refrigerator now?

Now? It's nearly midnight.

Yes. Now.

No. I'll wash it in the morning.

Promise.

Yes.

I'm going to ask you in the morning.

OK. You're weird, you know that, right?

Goodnight, Mom. I love you. 

********

Dear WdM, I am so, very, very sorry for everything and anything and I don't know what happened to you and I don't know what's up with your youngest just now but it seems to me, looking in from out here that you had a life well lived, that you cut a wide path and made some significant contributions. I'm sorry you don't get to watch your kids grow up. I'm glad you got the last nine years. If time is all we have, and I really believe it is, it looks like yours has been well spent. godspeed to the clearing. 

Senior: 2018

I drove home from Basking Ridge on Wednesday night instead of Thursday so I could be here for the very last first day of school ever. She was afraid it wouldn't happen. She was afraid they wouldn't let me. She was afraid somehow the job would come first as it has so many times before. What she failed to understand is that the job has very rarely come first when it really mattered and when that sort of thing happened it was either because I'd made an egregious error in judgement or something truly catastrophic happened at work and I had to make a choice. So what it boiled down to, for whatever reason is she failed to understand just how important the first day of school is to me or that I recognize how important the moment at the rock on the first day of school is to her.

I know all about that. I know all about that because on the first day of 8th grade in 2013 I chose to be in Cape Breton with Portnoy which turned out to be an egregious error in judgement. She cried, I cried and I swore I'd be in front of that rock in 2014 for the first day of high school. When 2014 came around and Portnoy and I were looking at weeks in Cape Breton and I looked at the school calendar and gave him the end date he was marginally irritated because it cut his nine day plan down a bit (short term memory loss, I think) but I was damn clear about where I'd be. You see, taking her picture in front of the rock on day 3 of 8th grade was just awful. For both of us. It never happened again and yet as we approached the very last first day ever, she was frightened. 

And then, of course, I went and showed up on Wednesday night. Not having counted on this, she'd scheduled a late session with her therapist which meant she wasn't home when I pulled in super late (for some reason it took me close to three hours to get home) and didn't walk in the door until 9:45. 

Elizabeth, are you alright?

Yeah.

Elizabeth, you don't sound alright. Can you come over here where I can see you?

OK.

Elizabeth, are you crying?

Yes.

Why are you crying, sweetie?

I don't know.

Well why don't you come over here and sit next to me.

I tossed the cat off the couch and she sat very close and then put her head in my lap. She only does this when the world is ending except now I just sort of wonder because recently we've been talking about how it's good to cry and if you do it in front of people they can just sit there and listen to you and that's a good thing too so then you're just not alone. She cried for a while, softly and then like her heart would break. And then she sat up.

I'm scared.

What are you scared of.

I'm scared of tomorrow?

Why?

I'm afraid that it's all going to be over.

You have another year.

But this is it. This is the last year and then it will all be over.

You feel safe here, don't you?

Yes.

It's a small town, a small, tight community where everybody knows everybody else and you know your place in our town and know where you belong and this is your home. And therefore you know who you are. Something like that?

Yes. 

Well. That's exactly why we came here. Not so much because of this town specifically but because I wanted to raise just one of you, finally, K-12 in one place so you wouldn't be like a refugee going from one place to another, never really fitting in. Never really knowing who you are. I never really knew who I was. Just as soon as I started to figure it out we moved again. When we lived in Glastonbury for five years I was starting to get it and then we came to Fairfield when I was sixteen and my whole world turned upside down. I never got over it. I still think Glastonbury is my home.   

I'm going to have to leave here and my whole world will turn upside down.

I don't think that's true, honey. Your town isn't going anywhere. 

I say this wondering just how long I'm actually going to stay here, having been contemplating my exit strategy for years. The plan having been to rent the house for at least close to the mortgage payment and then rent something very small in a much less expensive area for significantly less money. This plan looks like a 45% savings. Another is to rent out all three spare rooms leaving her no place to return. That only gets me to 35% and feels sort of heinous. Another is to arrange a short sale with the bank but I have no idea what that would really do to me. Another is to simply wait it out but that's a really bad idea in the long run because the market is just not going to come back. I'm not coming out of this whole before retirement unless something insane happens again. Neighbors across the circle just walked away and moved to Florida. I don't know what deal they worked out with the bank but they hit retirement and were truly under water and the house wasn't paid off yet. There is some bad shit going on out here still. So, yeah, I'm thinking these things and weighing my options as I have this conversation with my daughter who appears to require an anchor of some sort.

But you're going to move to New Jersey as soon as I go to school.

Not necessarily, sweetie and not necessarily right away.

You said you would keep my safe place the same way you kept it for Lucia. 

Well, I kept it for Lucia for so long because there was no reason to get rid of it. I only recently started cleaning that room out and it only took me this long because it was such a monstrous chore. The girl is the biggest packrat of us all. Also it's very hard for me to let go of my children completely. 

I need you to stay here until I finish college.

I can't promise you that, sweetie but I can promise you this, no matter where I am, we are. Do you understand what that means? 

Yes, I think so.

And no matter where we are, this town isn't going anywhere. You will always belong here for as long as you live. You could walk away right now and you would always be able to come back even if the town changed completely you could always come back as long as you could find some sign that it was still the same town. They would have to take away the main roads, the school campus, and the forest for this to not be the town anymore. It would be bad to take away the town center but that wouldn't kill the town.

They want to put in a nail salon.

Elizabeth. The people who hate change won't even let them put in a five acre dog park in the middle of those fifty acres of town land which are meant to be EXACTLY for that sort of thing. How the hell do you think they're going to get a nail salon in there?

They want to tear down the onion barn. They think it's an eyesore. 

Good luck with all that. Did you know that 25% of the families in this town are armed? 

She went to bed at 10 and said she'd be up at 6:45 and asked when I'd be up. At 7, I said. When I got up at 7 her room was quiet. She'd set her alarm for 6:45 PM. It's been a long time since she did that. She was mostly embarrassed. We heard her bus go by at 7:05 and this was the first year there would be no one to put on that bus. The bus slowed in front of our house even though I hadn't filled out the survey indicating she'd need the bus. He was looking for her anyway. That part of my life was over. I wanted to run out and tell him to drive by faster in the morning so it wouldn't hurt so bad but realized I'd never have to notice again. I'd either be away or asleep. 

She didn't want to go in on time because she started out the year with first period free but it is traditional for all seniors to gather on the steps in their blue and gold t-shirts the same way they will run around the circle of k-2 students gathered in the morning fresh off the later k-5 bus, wearing their caps and gowns on graduation day, reaching out to grasping hands and cheering the littles on, wishing them a great and successful life and urging them to play and work hard. She didn't want to go in on time because to stand on those steps in her blue and gold t-shirt with her 200+ classmates would be to acknowledge for real the beginning of the end and she, like me, looks around at these faces now and can only see the baby faces, the four and five year olds from when it all began. 

Later she admitted to crying quietly on the steps. 

Did anyone see?

Yes.

Seriously?

Yes. I let people see me. 

Wow. So how did that go?

I got a lot of hugs and then some other people cried.

Um. OK. I'm not surprised that other people cried but you let people hug you?

It seemed like the right thing to do.

How did it feel?

Let's not go there.

OK.

But when she was ready to leave the driveway she looked at her car parked up by the garage and then looked at me, confused. I told her to move her car to the rock so that the nose of the car was just at the start of the rock and then to put her backpack on the ground in front of the car. Now, you, stand in front of the car. You are both going to school. So you will have your picture taken together in front of the rock. It only took four tries before I had something she was willing to have posted. Later her father was shocked she'd agreed. I was sort of stunned he didn't get it. 

I was thinking afterward, again, about how many years and how many firsts. Putting Michael on the bus for the first time in 1991 with Lucia just a few weeks old in the stroller at the bottom of the 1,100 foot driveway, I was trying to gauge when the first day of school might have been back in 1991 in Oxford, CT, fairly certain it would still have been after Labor Day when I realized that Michael's first day of school was not the first day of school. Michael went to a daycare facility called A Child's Garden which is still in business and now offers a kindergarten alternative for five year olds which had they offered in 1991 he would have stayed for. Unfortunately he aged out of the program where he had been thriving for at least two years since we'd moved him from the Norwalk YMCA program where he went at nine months which, while perfectly fine, wasn't quite what we wanted pre-school to be. His care providers, two lovely young women, begged us not to put him in kindergarten despite the fact that the Oxford school system would take him at four. He is not ready, they told us. He is so happy here but he will not do well there. We didn't know what to do. We found a pre-school that would take him in Oxford at a church and he was enrolled. Within a week we knew we had a problem. He is too old. He is too big (he was average). He is too aggressive. Seriously? I spent two hours watching from the office doorway. It was an unmitigated disaster. I didn't know where these kids had been but it wasn't A Child's Garden. They rode their tricycles in quiet, polite circles around the church basement floor. No one bumped or rode outside the line. When they were ordered to stop, they all stopped at once. My kid careened into the wall shrieking in delight. I took him home and called the school. My bad. I should have kept him home with Lucia's nanny until I found an alternative. And so began the undoing of my son. 

That was 26 years ago. The first of firsts which eventually led me to our town in search of a more forgiving place so that the last of the firsts might have a fighting chance. The public school system will eat your kids alive given the half an inch to do it in. The cost of the last of the firsts has turned out to be rather astonishing but when I think about it I wonder just what is the point anyway? What am I supposed to be accumulating? I don't know what the hell my parents were accumulating but it sure as hell wasn't doing me much good. I was drowning. Yeah, I know all the things I'm supposed to be worried about. Worry isn't going to help. I would have had to have had the foresight eight years ago to know what was going to happen to the market for anything to have been different and even then I would have had to have been mentally and emotionally stable enough to have been able to cope with picking my girls up and finding another place to live; although if I'd dug my heels in and said, no, I am not going to assume the burden of this mortgage enough would have been handled for me that the momentum might have gotten me over the hump. Or. Or I could have made the choice four years ago to walk instead of refinance and let him off the mortgage. I was 48 years old at the time and could not bring myself to look personal bankruptcy in the eye. If I had the house, I had a place to live and my children had a place to live. If I did not have a house and had literally no money left which is what happens with bankruptcy and I lost my job and couldn't pay rent I would have no place to live and my children would go... well, one would go to her father in a state of misery and the other lived in the dorm and might have gone to her father in the summer but more likely her brother. Me? Be damned if I know. 

So those were my two conscious choice points. In the meantime we have arrived at the last gate and I will face the third. This time I will look dead in the eye, what is it that binds her to this house and this town? What has happened to her in her life that still needs so much repair (as if I didn't really have those answers)? What can be done in the next year to shore up those leaks and perhaps get her to spread her wings a little wider than she might otherwise? 

Here is to the little girl we put on the bus three months and ten days before her fifth birthday. She had a tag around her neck so that the correct teacher could claim her as she stepped off the bus. I was so scared. It never occurred to me to be scared when I put her siblings on the bus. I was so much younger then.  

Incoming class of 2018: Kindergarten - Day 1, most likely September 1, 2005 (based on the 2005 calendar)

Having broken the gender box...

I rolled in on Tuesday night just past seven and found her in the driveway pulled far enough to the left I didn't have to hang out on the street or pull up on the grass which really wouldn't have been an issue either way. She was getting the mail which in itself is not a recently developed skill but getting it every day and dropping it in the same location (I could wish for some place other than the stove top but since an induction stove won't start without the right sort of metal...we choose our battles) is epic. 

She stood there pulling out college catalogs (the herpes of the junk mail world. if you haven't been party to it, you just cannot imagine the influx that begins to trickle in at the end of sophomore year and may never stop - Lucia is 26, it's still coming) as if that thing we'd been looking for since the second week of August hadn't suddenly appeared at her feet. We had this idea that it wouldn't come; that somehow the $25 payment I made in early June before her junior year was even complete would have gotten lost somehow and she'd be the one student in her graduating class of two hundred or something like that to be forgotten. Periodically I checked my bank statement to be certain that yes, I did make a payment to the PTO for $25 and there would be a senior sign by the mailbox and we couldn't quite explain why we felt this way after all these years, why would Elizabeth be left out?

That's my stuff. 

Her stuff is this: My mom is going to forget this shit again and I'm not going to have a yearbook. One time. One time I forgot to order the yearbook and she didn't have one. 

Her stuff is actually a lot more reasonable than my stuff. I do forget stuff. I forget stuff all the time. That's because I don't have a spouse. I tried that once, it didn't work out. He was not a very good spouse. He sort of sucked at it. After the fact I realized he sucked at it because he didn't have the instruction manual. Or, he had the instruction manual or at least the quick reference guide but at some level didn't believe those things applied to him. Yeah, see, this is a problem. If you sign up for the job of SAHD then you get to do the job of SAHD the same way the woman gets to do the job of SAHM if she signs of for that job. Don't get me started. In the end, the GTWM gets to do the job of the SAHM and the GTWM because the GTWD says, are you fucking nuts?! I can't do all that shit! And the world does agree. GTW is Go To Work if you haven't worked that out. Anyway, I divorced my SAHD because it did NOT work out, not on any level whatsoever, not on the SAHD front, not on the spousal front, not on the partnership front, not on the any fucking front and guess who carried that blame? Moi. I even shouldered it for a while. I made an egregious error, I said. No, I did not. I made a very reasonable decision at the time and it did not work out. 

So that wasn't going where I expected but that's OK.

We were both worried about that sign for two different reasons. Hers was reasonable, mine was rooted in a very old fear that is steeped in some very old hurts and probably a great deal of loss. To counteract my fear, which might have alleviated hers if she'd understood, I was probably one of the first ten mothers to pay for that sign. As soon as the PTO announcement hit my mailbox I was online with my debit card filling out her information and submitting payment. My kid was getting her sign no matter what.

When I drive home on Tuesday nights I am road weary and also wired, a state of being that leaves you open and vulnerable; it's as if anything floating by can get in, things you might miss entirely could embed themselves before you even noticed they were there. I'm not sure why Tuesdays are different than Thursdays other than there is a sense of urgency. I am already a good way into my week. I have put in two solid twenty hours broken in half with a hotel stay that involves mostly white noise and I know I need to get home as quickly as possible in order to maximize the time I have with this kid before I roll myself into my own bed and right back out the door at 5:45 Wednesday morning for another two days of the same. I am more relaxed on Thursday because it is over. What I do on Friday while still hell bent on getting shit done is different and I'm not going anywhere. 

The final stretch of Route 53 North into the Forest is a drive I've been making since I was twenty. Granted there was solid gap between the time Joe and I left, pregnant with Michael for the wilds of the farm in Oxford but the drive is still the drive and the two destinations aren't more than two miles apart as the crow flies. Because the most of the houses up against the road are not new houses and the bends in the road have not changed, other than the one traffic light introduced god only knows when, it is still the road and the drive is firmly embedded in muscle memory as are many other things. 

I was so young when we left, driven by that blind sort of hope which has flavor and substance but hasn't had time to solidify into anything particularly measurable. I was twenty-two, I loved my husband, and we were going to have a baby. We headed into this thing which was truly unknown, biting off way more than we would have dared had we really been able to comprehend the possible ramifications which were far more than monetary and tumbled headfirst down the rabbit hole leaving the perceived safety of the Forest and Fairfield County behind us. 

Life lifed. 

Once I wanted to sit my children down and explain a few things but I couldn't figure out how to do it. I wanted to tell them, given the timing of their births and circumstances how differently they'd really been raised. I wanted to tell the girls, listen, Michael, he really had nothing, absolutely nothing. You really don't understand this. One year I came up with $60 when he was twelve years old and bought him his first large Lego set for his birthday and that's all he got and that was seriously EPIC. And this is why he won't let me get rid of the legos in my attic and he's thirty now. Later when he was older and you were younger and there was more money he had more but he was just about out of the house. He had a year of ski school I think and you, Lucia had three and you, Elizabeth had for freaking ever. He had a single birthday party. Just one. OK, one and a half but I botched that first one so badly there wasn't really anyone there. Lucia had one. Just one. Elizabeth. You had a major, different theme'd party every single year beginning in kindergarten. We didn't spend huge amounts of money but we put enormous effort into it. Elizabeth. You. Had. Everything. He. Had. Nothing. Subjectively speaking. Lucia falls somewhere in the middle. Even when Mike and Lucia were small and Mike had nothing, Joe would buy things for Lucia to make her happy. No one understood this and Mike had to live with it. I want to tell them about these discrepancies but I don't really know how. I want to explain how hard it was in the beginning but then I realize it isn't really any easier than it ever was; it's just different and now we have more to some extent and in others we don't. It's an odd mix. I want to explain what happened on that last two mile stretch of Route 53 North...

Like a lightening bolt it went in one side of my head and out the other leaving a twenty-six year burn.

In August, 2005 with my four year old in my arms, I dragged my newly minted fourteen year old by the hand over the border into Weston calling over my right shoulder for my recent high school graduate to hurry and catch up, please, I needed help with the baby, she was getting heavy. I held my head up with my refugee children, and clenched my jaw and looked straight ahead and said, I am from here and I am coming back if it kills me and you and you and you cannot do a damn thing to stop me. I waited a year. It would have been far better if I had come in 2004 economically but I waited a year because moving my boy at the end of high school might have been an unmitigated disaster. As it was, introducing his sister into the Weston pond at the beginning of eighth grade was tantamount to ripping her skin off. She spent the first three months hiding in the bathroom at lunch and the next three in the library. Toward the end of the school year a girl named Callie walked into her biology class and smacked her over the back of head with the great big text indicating that they were now close friends. It has been twelve years. Callie will be a bridesmaid in Lucia's June wedding. Some things take hold and stay but the damage was done and Lucia remained a refugee to the bitter end. 

I placed the last of my maternal hope on the baby. Her birthday is in December and in this town they'll enroll them until December 31. We didn't think, given the first two needing to repeat grades that this was a very good idea but went back and forth and in talking to the school decided to give it a shot because the school had no problem cycling them through kindergarten twice. Elizabeth, we were quite certain, was going to cycle twice. Until March she sat there at her desk without saying a word and interacted poorly with the other children despite the fact that at after school care she more or less ran the place. In April she made one giant leap forward and we were told she should progress. We, along with the entire kindergarten staff, were astonished. She repeated this process for the next five years. 

At the end of the first year at Lucia's eighth grade moving up ceremony we sat in chairs under a large white tent on the great expanse of lawn on the compound which holds all four schools. They do this every year. The principal asks the student body to raise its hands if it has been here since kindergarten. It looked like more than 75% of the student body had its hands up. He said, this is why you are here. This is why your parents are here. Your parents brought you here for this school and those of you who did not raise your hands and have come recently, welcome. You're here for the same reason. I looked at my five year old and thought, yes, this is is why I came here. I came here to raise one child in a single school system, start to finish. I came to give at least one of my children the chance to grow up in a single town, to not be moved, to define herself in a community, to not have to experience the loss, and fear, and disassociation that comes from being picked up and dropped into the unknown over and over again. 

I looked at my five year old and thought, I don't care what it takes, we are not going anywhere. 

We picked Weston initially because when Elizabeth was small she stopped talking. She started talking late but in an odd way. She didn't have those first words babies normally have but she sang. She watched Sesame Street and Between the Lions and one day we listened to her singing. Not humming, singing. She made the sounds of the words but only if there was music. She sounded like she had perfect pitch or might have perfect pitch. If you looked at her too closely or tried to interact or sing back, she stopped. Unless it was Baby Beluga and then everybody sang. At fifteen months the words came and there was eye contact and there had always been physical contact but at the same time her SAHD was having trouble being a SAHD and we put her in day care two days a week mostly for more stimulation and to give him some time to do whatever it was he wanted to be doing. At eighteen months her day care provider, a woman who ran a small service with no more than five children under two and a half indicated that Elizabeth was not making eye contact and had stopped talking. kathy was very worried because Elizabeth didn't come in that way. She showed us how Elizabeth avoided the other children but couldn't come up with a reason why because there hadn't been an incident, it just happened gradually. This is the age of parallel play anyway but not avoidance. Elizabeth stopped talking at home and stopped making eye contact. She stopped wanting to be held and pushed away physical contact. She still sang back to the television.

We took her to the doctor who said: we do not diagnose the spectrum this early however, there is a program called Birth to Three in Connecticut and it is free and you should start using it. Do not take her out of day care, Kathy sounds like she knows what she's doing and at this point, don't isolate Elizabeth. So we brought in Birth to Three and found out about play therapy and Elizabeth was in the Birth to Three program until we left Stamford (despite having aged out of it). No one could ever say what happened or why. Elizabeth gradually rejoined us on her own terms but it left us frightened and wondering what she might need in the future. I decided what she might need was the best possible public school system we could find her in terms of funding and expectation. 

I remembered the town I left when I was pregnant with Mike. The town in the Forest that existed more or less to fund a school. It was an idyllic town, a small town, the marriage of what was left of a farming community and the top of the middle class. It was an expensive community but it was understated and focused on family, education, and community. I wanted to go home. 

So I told the father of my first two children who told his wife who was livid because she did NOT want to live in the Forest. Somehow I got my way on this one. This was the only thing I got my way on and I'm not really sure how I pulled it off. They moved in a full year before we did which put the kids in the nearly untenable position of having to commute from Weston to Stamford to go to school every other week. The suckage meter on that was astonishing. I did not think to ask them much about the town. 

When David and I started looking at houses I nearly fell over. There was just no way in hell we were going to be able to swing this. We were looking at the bottom of the market which was 200k above the top of our budget. Had we come one year earlier we might have been OK. But we didn't. There were three houses. One was right at the top of our budget. It would have had to be gutted before we could live in it. The black mold was terrifying. The second was 100k above the top of our budget. We couldn't figure out where to put Mike other than in a very dank basement and the other bedrooms were two small to fit two beds to house two girls. 

I cried when we bought our house. It's OK, David said. Someday there will be no alimony and no child support and we will have the whole of your income and the whole of my income and this will be alright and in the mean time we may incur some debt if there are problems but it will all work out. I did the math, looked down the road with a great deal of faith and signed the papers. I can always bail, I thought. I can always bail if the shit hits the fan. I don't want to bail. I want to raise my kid right here, K-12, but if I have to bail, I can freaking bail.

That was in August of 2005. In October of 2009 we were divorced and it was just my salary and one gigantic mortgage. No, one gigantic mortgage and a gigantic home equity loan which had somehow gotten bigger while I wasn't looking because I CHECKED OUT AND STOPPED PAYING ATTENTION (don't do that). 

The house could not be sold. Between August of 2005 and August of 2009 when it was reappraised it had lost 35% of it's value. It continued to drop over the next five years while the rest of the country recovered. Today it is worth approximately the top of our 2005 budget. Twelve years later, this house is under water AND the mortgage payments have increased by $1380 a month because the HELOC is no longer an interest only payment. 

So. The point of all this is that Life has continued to life. Things don't always go the way you think they're going to. We make the best decisions we can given the information we have at the time and then, more often than not I think, we punt. The searing image of my refugee children in August, 2005 just isn't going to go away. Refugees from what, exactly? From not having enough? From an inconsistent life? From never really belonging anywhere? From an existence when examined, was really way too harsh?

If I was a man I would have many awards by now. I don't know who gives out these awards but I'm quite certain I would have them. This occurs to me only because of how harsh I am with myself as I come to the end of this one particular road having done this thing at a price I haven't even begun to tally yet, having gotten this one last baby k-12 in one town. 

This occurs to me because of how harsh I am with myself as I come to the end of the twenty-six year road, having put the first baby on the school bus just after labor day in 1991 when Lucia was just a few weeks old and Elizabeth wasn't even on the map. 

This occurs to me because of how harsh I am with myself as I come to the end of the twenty-six year road, having just written the check for Lucia's wedding while plotting out Elizabeth's tuition payments while plotting out how long I can keep commuting to Basking Ridge while trying to figure out what the HELL I'm going to do about the dog when she goes off to school NEXT year.

This occurs to me because of how harsh I am with myself when I realize all the things I have NOT done which I SHOULD have done...

... and I want to sit my three refugee children down and explain to them...

Listen, you have to understand, Momma has worked so very, very hard for longer than you can imagine and while I want to give you all the things you think you should have, you really just aren't going to get them all. You're going to get some of them. And if you give me that look of disappointment and hurt when I tell you no, you're going to break my heart. 

I want to say, go ask your fathers but I stopped saying that a very long time ago. 

All of this is my stuff. My fears, my belief in my own inadequacy. My belief that I should be able to just come up with it, make it right, whatever it is. Work a little harder, smarter, develop whatever skill set I need to make the money required to get where we need to be...

That last part isn't necessarily wrong, by the way. It's not wrong until I add the fear and the bad feeling on top of it. 

If I were growing corn I would need to grow enough corn to have seven years of food put by in case of blight and famine. That's a very simplified metaphor but in the end it's the same drive and focus that catapults the hunter-gatherer away from the fire. 

The problem is I've broken the gender box but I've still got the pieces parts of the horrible box called Woman stuck all over me. 

So I'm working on that but I'm pretty sure I know now why I find the idea of a male partner absolute anathema at this point. I've got about half a centimeter of tolerance left for anything which smells even faintly of male centric behavior as it relates to expectation of Woman. 

Weigh anchor

Due to the 4th falling on a Tuesday this year I had five days home in a row which was a real luxury. I worked from home on Friday (normal) and then again on Monday (whoa! shoulda been out of here at 5:45), was suddenly off again on Tuesday (huh? who does that in the middle of the week without extending it one way or another into a long weekend?), and THEN out of here at 5:45 on Wednesday morning which shortened my Basking Ridge / Marriott week but also shortened the back end as well. Instead of rolling in here at 8:15 on Thursday night I rolled in at 7:37 last night (Friday) which was weird as HELL because I made a 97 mile drive through three of the worst traffic patterns in the country in just under 90 minutes, 7 of those miles being back roads. Guaranteed one time deal but I was happy for it; I expected a 9:30 arrival. I had a migraine making a solid attempt to eat the left side of my face and I've been instant relief migraine medication free for close to a year for a myriad of reasons, the top two being: 1. it's like pulling teeth to get my GP to refill (WHY, YOU SADIST, WHY?!!!) and 2. with the onset of menopause this shit is SUPPOSED TO BE LETTING UP and the prophylactic medication is meant to be enough to keep it from taking over my life. That was sort of working until the onset of menopause turned out to be a BIG FAT EFFING LIE. I am now regular as clockwork again and so are the 'eat your brain like a salad bar' migraines. 

I sat on the couch trying to finish the left sleeve on a sweater that isn't going to fit at the hips unless I lose ten pounds (abandon all hope and start on the next and for the love of god, LEARN to check ALL OF THE MEASUREMENTS before you blindly accept the instructions, or modify the pattern accordingly - it really wouldn't have taken much to make this right) with a glass of wine (not advisable) and the beginning of season ten, Supernatural which is something I decided to watch start to finish like the train wreck I think it is (personal assessment) because I can't quite understand how they got twelve very long seasons out of it. Wait, they're in the middle of season thirteen. This has been going on since 2005. Anyway, I've been watching this start to finish or start to current and it's sort of soothing because it's predictable and I can work on the sweaters and process and let go of the day. Once I left the Indigo for the Marriott I started sleeping very well. I don't know if I can attribute that to the not so thin walls, the seriously better beds, the finally adjusting to the new rhythm, the ability to engage with some level of competence at my job (it isn't that I'm not competent, I just needed to absorb enough information to be useful, or more useful than just a high level PM - OK, I'm probably being hard on myself), or maybe a little of all of it. 

Because Elizabeth is still in Paris the house is still empty. Empty and quiet. I feel disconnected. What I really want to do is go to bed but I'm afraid to do that because I really don't want to wake up at 4 AM and stare at the ceiling. There's a Mom's coffee the next town over at 10 AM organized by my friend, Sharon and I really want to go, mostly because it's organized by my friend, Sharon and when people turn up it matters to her but also because it's the sort of thing that keeps me from isolating. I weigh this. I am highly unlikely to have anything more than superficial conversation with any of these women and I don't want to do that with a migraine (I know damn well it's still going to be there in the morning). I have a limited window of home time and I don't want to spend several hours of it in a crowded coffee shop where the ambient noise level is likely to fall into a decibel range that will require twice the recovery time to undo the damage. I ping Sharon to give her plenty of heads up so she'll have the processing time required to avoid feeling abandoned. Her response is exactly what everyone else's response is ever: Feel better. For some reason that always leaves me feeling guilty and I have no idea why. I shouldn't feel badly? I shouldn't have migraines? By virtue of being told to feel better I should get over this asap? This has nothing to do with people wishing me well, this is entirely my stuff; I just don't know why. I want to crawl into a dark room but I'm afraid that if I do that, if I take away the distraction of the knitting and Sam and Dean trying to kill each other I'll have nothing but the migraine at the salad bar and I'm not sure I have the bandwidth to bear that at the moment.

At 9:45 I hit the tipping point, crate the dog, shut off the lights, and stagger down the hall. My sleep app tells me that while my sleep quality wasn't particularly great I fell asleep relatively quickly and stayed that way for the most part. I dreamed of pain. The audio was very high. I listened to some of it to figure out why. Apparently I was sleeping on top of my phone so it picked up the sound every time the sheets moved and it picked up something I'd never heard before. I heard distress. Not labored breathing, just a change in the sound on the exhale; not quite a whimper, more like the sound you might make if you'd been crying or you might cry and you knew no one could hear you. It was not a cry for help, it was a quiet release. That and, oh, what what the fuck, this hurts so damn much and it still hurts and when is it going to stop and all that business too I suppose. The places we go when we don't have to be stoic anymore even if that place is only in our sleep.

In the morning I got up because I knew perfectly well it would hurt less if I had coffee to go with a tylenol/advil cocktail and maybe brought my blood sugar up even though I didn't feel even remotely hungry. Plus the dog needed to go out.

Which brings me back to my arrival in Basking Ridge on Wednesday morning followed by the right turn into the Marriott parking lot at 6:30 that evening, but I'm getting ahead of myself. 

Having choreographed and learned all the variations of a complex ballet written to get me the hell out of the house in twenty-five minutes or less on Monday mornings with everything I'll need for four days and three nights I have developed the 'oh crap, I think the dog ate my homework' syndrome. My homework could be anything from having forgotten my building badge to my power cord, my parking pass could have inexplicably slid off my window, hell, my bloody computer could be sitting on the dining room table and I could have walked out the door with a VERY light computer bag. It is highly unlikely that these things are going to happen because at 4 PM on Sunday, I close up shop which I guess is the equivalent to moving out. Sort of. I'm trying to have it not be that way.

This is the easy part except for the wireless mouse which is mine and gets swapped out with the Mac on weekends except I'm trying not to do that right now. If it was just the mouse it would be fine but there's the usb thingie which talks to the mouse and has to be plugged back into the Dell. Using the Dell without a mouse is so not a good idea. Technically this thing could be at the top of the stairs and ready to go on Friday night. Computer. Ready to go. Check. 

This is the hardest. This bag carries two things, the knitting and the pillow. The knitting gets shoved in there at 10 PM when I go to bed (that's easy) but I have to remember to bring the pillow with me on the way out the door. If I forget it I sleep without. Not a big deal, actually. If the Mac comes with me, it goes in here too. However, until I've collected enough nights at the Marriott for truly free wifi, that's not happening. 

Now we're at the heart of it. My little red suitcase. I unpack as little as possible from this thing. Read that book, by the way. Brand new up and coming writer of young adult literature. This is an advanced readers copy, the real thing will hit the shelves in about three weeks. The author has been pushing a broom at a high school since he graduated from college with a degree in something, probably writing. Anyway, he's been pushing a broom because it paid the rent and gave him the time to write. I don't know very many people willing trade manual labor for time anymore, or willing to do whatever it takes, or whatever, you get the point. He was clear when he went to school, why he was going to school, and he was clear when he went out and got the job why he wanted that particular job, and he was clear when he sat down and started writing about his intentions. I've only known him for a couple of years and I never thought to ask him how long he's been at it but I'm going to guess about eight years which means at least six of solid rejection before he got to The Gravedigger's Son. Yeah, OK, that was offtrack. 

Packing. I unpack as little as possible. Everything on the left side stays in except the orange makeup bag. I'm not quite committed enough to invest in duplicate cosmetics. Everything else though, yup, right down to the electric toothbrush although I do wish I'd spent a little more money on the duplicate. Oh well. If I thought I could get away with it I'd put three dresses on the right side the night I came home but then I'd possibly have to iron something on the backend and I can't have that. I wear almost nothing that has to be dry-cleaned so it comes out, goes into the pile to be washed (which is very small so laundry doesn't get done weekly) and at 4 PM, or within that hour replacements go in. I tried closing it up one Sunday night and throwing the orange bag in with the knitting and the pillow but then I panicked because I thought I didn't have it. So this thing lays open on my floor until Monday morning when I'm done with the orange bag which gets tossed onto the left, zipped, flipped, zipped again, stood up, and wheeled down the hall with my pillow under my arm. The last thing that happens is I grab the travel mug of coffee, put the dog back in the crate and head out the door.

You want to know how I do this in twenty-five minutes or less. I shower the night before, let my hair dry BEFORE I get into bed and then spend about five minutes with a curling iron putting in enough wave to hide the bedhead. Conceivably I could get out faster but there's that getting myself fully awake business. Showering in the morning would take care of that but I can't get the shower and hair drying business done in under seventeen minutes. That's my record so far and it's just not worth it. The solution would be to take a number seven blade to my head but I'm thinking that would end badly. 

I get gas on the parkway just before exit 37. This costs me exactly four minutes and for some absurd reason doesn't seem to cost much more than getting it in town. 

As I get into the right lane for exit 30a off of 287 at roughly 7:30 I am vacillating between that feeling of 'the dog ate my homework' and 'oh, yay! I'm back!' I pull off the exit for the Communication Company and approach the gate where they wave you through if you have a parking pass (and mine has most assuredly NOT slipped off my window) and I drive over 97 speed bumps as I circle all seven connected buildings to come around the backside of parking garage #3 which is still mostly empty (because for the love of god, it's not even 8 yet) and drive to the way back, park in the same spot I always park in and ride up the exact, correct elevator banks (15 and 16), turn right, and right, pass the scrum master's cube (he'll be in shortly), drop my stuff on the purloined desk (I will be evicted shortly) and plug in. I check for weekend disasters and then head for the Millennial floor for coffee. This week they have finally changed the rubber band sign from Kindness Matters to:

This is in response to a man, one man, just one man who sent an email to a distribution list with well over 1000 names on it. A DL that large should be in lockdown and the reason DLs that large are in lockdown is because PEOPLE HIT REPLY ALL. When people hit reply all, thousands of emails flood the email server and depending on the capacity of the server, the number of linked servers, and how many people are doing this simultaneously, well, you can bring the email server to its knees. Seriously. These things don't generally occur to people outside IT. Not only that but the size of a DL doesn't occur to people in general. Most people won't even expand a DL to check it's size or to see who's on it. Most really big DLs are made up of nested DLs (they'd better be, hard coded DLs are lunacy) so you really have no way of knowing how big they are unless you expand everything but if you're going to hit reply all, maybe you should, just so everybody receiving the next email can see how many people are receiving your reply which is one of these:

1. Hey! Take me off this list! I don't want to be getting these emails!
2. Hey! People! Stop hitting Reply All! (you cannot make this shit up)

In the space of about two hours more than 600 people responded to either the initial email or other emails. Each email had three obvious addresses, the name of the person who sent the email last, the name of the person sending it now, and the DL. As these emails came in I noticed that nothing else was coming in. I went to Outlook, pulled up the DL and found the owner. What to do. Surely somebody had contacted the guy by now. Surely IT was aware of this. How long does it take to open a DL and flag it locked? I was going to send an email but then I realized the owner of the DL already had 600 emails in his inbox. I put them all in a folder marked dangerous. The next morning all the backlogged communication AND another 200 reply to all from the day before flooded in before the server emptied itself out. I'm saving the 800 reply all in the dangerous folder because I have this overwhelming desire to run a demographic analysis on the culprits. They will not be the Millennials. 

So, yeah, that. Fast forward, rewind, whatever it takes - back to Wednesday at about six when it was time to walk out the door and get back on 287 northbound toward the Marriott which is technically a daily commute since it's nearly ten miles by highway and the last three miles tend to get a bit congested. Except I don't exactly experience it that way. I don't really have a viable explanation for this and maybe that will change but I think it has something to do with going from a ten hour sprint to absolute zero and I'm in the car and it's quiet and I don't really have anywhere to be so it doesn't matter if it takes a few extra minutes to get to my exit; I'm just there, kind of being. Even the evening when Elizabeth (Elizabeth, my boss, not Elizabeth, my last child) called as I was pulling out of the parking lot and talked to me until ten minutes after I'd parked at the end of it, it didn't really matter. I'm just getting from point A (the sprint) to point B (absolute zero) and my hair is not on fire but I am kind of used up for the day. 

Getting to the Marriott is absurd in a way that only New Jersey can possibly be absurd. This isn't even jug handle absurd. I can deal with jug handles; I figured those out in Wayne, New Jersey over thirty years ago the day I accidentally lit myself on fire trying to read the map, figure out how these damn things worked and get myself going the right direction on the divided highway while lighting a cigarette with a car lighter. You just don't forget that sort of thing when you have to walk into a client's building smelling like woodsmoke from the burning of an old map and you keep your raincoat wrapped tight because there's a hole in the front of your dress. But the lightbulb is on. 1. Don't smoke and read; 2. When the sign reads, turn right here for a left onto x, it's not kidding. Just go with it and trust the process.

But the getting to the Marriott. Absurd. There is no jug handle. There's nothing but a back door which may or may not be legal. I'll go with legal since there isn't exactly a sign reading NO U-TURNS. Here's how this works:

1. Get off 287 onto a six or eight lane divided highway (there's no hope of getting to the other side anytime soon
2. Go to the second light (wave to the Marriott on the wrong side of the divided highway)
3. Turn right and immediately get in the far left lane
4. At the light about 3/4 of a mile up the road make a u-turn at the green arrow
5. Follow the road back the way you came 
6. STAY TO THE LEFT FOR THE LOVE OF GOD OR YOU'LL END UP RIGHT BACK WHERE YOU STARTED
7. After staying to the left, move to the right lane immediately and pass under the divided highway (trust the process)
8. Hug the corner while you make a 270 degree turn on two wheels
9. Don't look left, just accelerate into what has become your right lane
10. Come off the gas, brake once to indicate that you intend to do something (DO NOT USE YOUR TURN SIGNAL, THE USE OF TURN SIGNALS IS CONSIDERED HOSTILE) and pull into the parking lot which you will only see at the last minute because of the trees and you will only know it's there because if you look all the way left to the OTHER side of the divided six or possibly eight lane divided highway you will see the road where you turned right in the first place to make the u-turn

As I turn right into the parking lot and prepare to turn left into guest parking the first thing that pops into my head is...

Oh thank god, I'm home.

I'm just going to let that sit there for a minute.

To weigh anchor means to pull the anchor up, to break free, which is the nautical term for pulling it out of the sea bed. I feel sick. I know I'm OK; it's just that it seems I've moved to New Jersey. It seems that I've packed up the minimal requirements, walked out the door, and said to no one in particular, yeah, OK, I'll pay the bills but I don't really care to live here anymore. I don't want to play this game. 

I realize part of that is Elizabeth having been gone for the last three weeks, or at least gone to me and when she comes home late tomorrow night I won't see enough of her to make much of a difference so it will be more like four weeks before I really see much of her at all. And it's been a struggle to find the balance with Lucia in terms of where to keep parenting and where to give her a good hard push. I haven't found a way to keep myself anchored to this house in the allotted time that I do have and I can feel how easily the anchor is breaking free. I look around at my home which has been my home now for twelve years and I find that I have very little attachment to it. 

The hotel room is empty, sterile, neutral. The house is cluttered, but empty. It reminds me that I have so much to do and so much of that is for other people and I don't want to do those things anymore. 

I don't want to worry about your tuition and talking you off your overpriced tuition ledge and pushing you into the entire process. I don't want to go through another round of new driver fear and cost. I don't want to drag you into therapy because you're not talking and then make sure you're going and that you're OK and force you to talk to me every night so I know you're in one piece. I don't want to come home and find out you've been living on powdered donuts. I want you to honor your part of our agreement. I don't want to find two beach chairs in the back of your car which strongly suggests that you've had a passenger in your car which you absolutely may not do until next freaking year. And you. I don't want to continue to pay for your medical and car insurance and cell phone and for the love of god, I do NOT want to drag you through the process of applying for ACA insurance because you are going to turn 26 and YOU HAVE TO DO THIS, I need two years of your tax returns to do it and you are ignoring me. I do NOT want to pay for your wedding and I do NOT want to listen to you whine about how you want that wedding to look because your budget is your budget, now get over it. And you. You cost me nothing. You take care of my dog, you leave me food to eat when I come home, and you fix my front door, but when I think about your future I'm scared shitless. There's nothing I can do about this; it's my stuff. You're smoking again. This causes me pain. It's none of my damn business. You smoke my brand and you always have. I wish I could fix this. I wish I could recognize that there's nothing that needs to be fixed. 

I wish my head didn't hurt. 

It will be OK and a new equilibrium will be reached it's just a bit disconcerting to pull into a freaking hotel parking lot and joyfully think: oh joy! I'm home! 

(now the minute those people start asking something of me other than I pay my bill or the room service people stop delivering my nightly cobb salads we might have a slight shift in attitude)

Two high speed ferries

In the beginning

It was mid January, 2003 and the alarm went off at 4:45 which was exactly as bad as you'd think it might be if the lights went off at 4. He rolled over on his side and his whole body said, please turn that light back off and she said, bypassing the light request entirely, 'do it for me.'

He got out of the bed wondering how the hell she was still functioning at three quarter speed and if she was one of those people who wound down like a clock losing noticeable minutes in the last few hours or would she come to a hard stop out of nowhere and fall face first onto the pavement. A week ago he'd have said he knew her well but that was stateside before the rules of engagement were thrown out the window without a replacement contract. He liked structure. He liked clarity. He did not live on any sort of edge and SHE was an unstructured moving target with notable edges. Moving notable edges with clarity. None of it made any sense. Tell me a story, she demanded, the first night she let him into her bed. Lying on his back looking up at the ceiling he made up something about a giraffe in the forest and later saw his rabbi's face in a dream and wondered if it had something to do with the giraffe in the forest or his wife. 

I can't give you everything you want, he told her, but I can give you some things. She looked at him and asked, who can? 

In the hotel lobby they sat waiting for the 5:30 shuttle that would take them to the high speed ferry that would take them from Malta to Sicily. When they made their reservations they asked one or two people to join them with the assumption that no one else had been booked one day late by the same admin and would be checking out. No one was coming with them but the lobby was full of people coming back down the street, shoes in hand from the final party or people, luggage in hand waiting for airport shuttles for flights through Rome back to New York for the most part. The assumed anonymity evaporated as their teammates approached one by one to ask about their day. He slumped deep into the hotel chair, nearly successful in his attempt to turn into a puddle of shadow soaked up by the dark carpet. She sat up straight, took deep breaths in and out to a count of eight with a hold at the top and bottom of two and slowly brought her brain back online. 

At 5:45 she poured the puddle of shadow into a beach pail and boarded the 5:30 shuttle. When they'd boarded the ferry and found appropriate seating she brought coffee and danish because she knew he'd eat sugar under duress and then wake up enough to watch the island disappear behind them. All things considered, watching an island the size of Malta turn into a speck in a matter of minutes is worth some of your attention at least once. Later they would do it from Hydra on the way back to Piraeus and much later they would turn their backs on Nantucket. 

The caffeine and sugar jumper cables brought him most of the way up but left his skin on the floor at his feet. Once the island was gone he wept freely. She resigned herself to a very long day of remorse. Married men. You never know what you're going to get until you unwrap the packaging. Boat bound, she pulled out compassion and settled in for the ride. She'd forgotten that his mother'd been dead less than a month. It only took twenty minutes to spill the brunt of it but apparently there really hadn't been any time or space to mourn properly. Of four siblings he was the youngest and the caretaker. I suppose if you manage enough logistics in your life you don't really have to look at the things that hurt, at least not directly. When it was over she put her arms around him and he collapsed onto her chest. Later on the bus on the way up the mountain to Aetna he said he felt as if he'd fallen right into the middle of her and had never felt so safe in his life. 

The day in Sicily was a magic bubble which could never and would never be repeated in any form ever again but because it exists as a point in time and time is a construct, that magic bubble is still happening, is always happening, and always will be happening. I like to think of it that way. 

Next. Assume chaos.

In October, 2005 they got married. 

Next. Assume chaos.

In the end

It was September, 2008 and they'd explored the island on foot and by bike for three days with the seventeen year old and the second au pair who had been with them a short time but long enough to cause uproar in the household, not that it was difficult to cause uproar in the household at that point. They were looking for suitable summer rental property because they wanted something different at least for one year because they'd done the same thing every year for all of her life and as much as she loved it she wondered what she might have been missing. What they didn't want to do was go in cold one summer and find themselves in a house in a location that didn't work. So. Three days in a B&B to scout the area. In retrospect they should have left the girls at home but the seventeen year old did not want to be left at home with the strange au pair and the strange au pair did not want to be left at home alone. 

She was a hot mess. During the day she could direct the family traffic and keep the girls in a mostly straight line. Her relationship with her husband was affectionate and functional. Her relationship with the rented bicycle on the island roads was not particularly functional. She was clipped once and outright rode into a moving vehicle twice. The daughter got the long tie of her skirt caught in the chain and because they were at the end of the line the husband and au pair rode on ahead unaware of the two sitting in the road, one crying quietly and the other working diligently to pull free the tie. They got all the way into town to the first stop sign before they realized what had happened and turned back.

Think of any string instrument which has been tuned to the point of breaking but is not quite there yet. You can hear it when you pull the bow across; it is not a subtle warning. It says, take the bow away and loosen the tuning pegs. Put it in a quiet room with perfectly controlled humidity and bring it food and wine and then ask nothing of it for several hours. After that give it some air and speak quietly. Alternatively, continue to play it and shut your eyes because every one of those strings is going to break violently in quick succession. The strings broke. She tried to put them back together but once broke, they're broke and the best you and do is stop playing and restring. 

No one but the seventeen year old understood what was happening. She sent her mother to bed. Later they went to dinner. On the way back to the B&B the seventeen year old and the au pair walked ahead a good block and a half and the woman tried to explain to her husband but the language wasn't there. She said, I feel like a hard boiled egg that has rolled off the table onto the floor. I've been picked up and set back on the table and most of the pieces of my shell are still there but I have a thousand little cracks all over me and I don't know what to do. Later that night she cried until she couldn't breathe and then walked through the dark street for hours until she could go back and face him. 

She wanted something he would never be able to give her but she couldn't say what it was. He wanted something she would never be able to give him but he couldn't say what it was. In the end it was probably just forgiveness but that's often harder than it looks especially when you're not sure what it is you're forgiving. She wished for the magic bubble of Sicily.

On the high speed ferry back from Nantucket they sat four in a row not looking at the island, just the seats in front of them except for the seventeen year old who had her nose in a book. He closed his eyes but she couldn't tell if he was really sleeping. She looked forward several seats and saw a man and a woman sitting side by side, pressed as close together as the two seats would allow. She wanted to tell them to not let go and she wanted to tell her husband to open his eyes and look. She reached for his hand and he took it with his eyes closed. She looked at him and thought as hard as she could: open your eyes! please open your eyes! 

They held hands and she looked at the two people several rows in front and remembered when they'd been in that place.