carrying the wait

I am tired.  Small children bother me.  The barking of dogs disturbs me.  The bread burns, the pot boils over, the water scalds, the bills mount, the milk curdles, the laundry sours, the phone rings incessantly... nothing is simple.  Life rushes ahead and none of it is comforting.

I am bitter.  Everything angers me.  Every simple chore has become a difficulty.  The sink is stacked with dishes.  The dog is not yet potty-trained.  The sheets need to be changed.  The floor is unswept and the lawn needs to be mowed.

I seethe with each task.  I gain a pound each time I look at food.  My hair has ceased to grow.  My skin blossoms with irritation.  Wine sours in my mouth.

I listen for the unspoken.  I keep note.  I bide.  I track.  I feel to my core the impending change.

Each jangle of the phone nettles me.  I answer warily.  It won't be long.   I am short and dismissive.  I am abrupt and irritable.  I drink more to feel less.

It is a countdown.

I've been told it won't be long, not to expect that she will last till Christmas.  I've been informed that she is already gone, that I wouldn't recognize her, that she is not the Gran I knew.

The children are sleeping.  The dog is in his crate.  The din of the TV hums from the other room.  I type. And delete.  And type.

Tomorow, the sun will rise and the it will begin again.  The dishes will still need to be washed, the paper will be spread out on the kitchen table, the dog will need to be walked, the litter will need to be changed.  Who knows how many things will remain the same?  Who knows if the unimaginable will come to fruition?  Will she leave me?  Will the sun set upon her face again?  Will the night fall without her heartbeat?  I spend these days waiting, wondering...

I am short.  I am tender.  Touch me lightly.  I cannot bear the weight.  The wait.  I cannot bear.

Twilight approaches

I do not venture out into the cold and wet.  I turn on enough lamps to light the whole house like daybreak and I busy myself.  I reorganize Tupperware cabinets or sort through linens.  If particularly bored, I might even iron.  Usually, I wait until around 11 AM EST and then I call Gran.  Yesterday was rather gloomy and chill, so I puttered about the house and then placed my call.

Her voice was a sad slow whisper.  I worried that perhaps just holding the phone would tire her.  She commented on the weather and how nice it was that my mother was visiting.  I tried to sound upbeat and chatty, commenting on my children's busy schedules but she had trouble following the conversation.

I call almost every day, afraid that every conversation will be our last.

I have nothing left I need to say, no admissions or pleas for forgiveness.  I do not need to convey any unspoken wishes or feelings.

I simply want to hear her voice.

I wish that I could hold her tissue thin hand in mine one more time.  Moreover, I wish was small, my plump hand in hers as we run errands through the sunny streets of Clarksdale.  I wish I was 15 and playing tennis, trying to return her wicked serve.  I wish I was 27 and receiving the beautiful peignoir she bought for my honeymoon.  Anywhere but here, anytime but now.

Every ring of the phone twists the strings of my heart; I pick up the receiver apprehensively.  I know soon I will take the call I have so long feared.

There will be no shock, no sudden loss.  Instead, we have endured this long goodbye.  Each day she weakens, slowly drifting away.

It is like watching twilight edge over the earth; the sun fades away as the darkness descends.

The Anniversary Post

There is laundry, dishes, lunches to be packed, dog poop to be disposed of, negotiating with the contractor, searching for fixtures, making up beds, vacuuming, sweeping, tidying... before noon.  When Tim gets home there is endless schlepping, fetching clothes, water, wine.  Put the children to bed.  Feed the dog. Scoop the cat litter.  Take out the trash.  Deep breath.

With Tim's foot broken, the chores around the house are endless.  And my patience is limited.  I regret getting the dog.  I second guess adding on to the house.  I rethink life in general.

Gran is dying.  The cat has chased the dog under the chair in the kitchen.  The dog yelps in distress.  Tim asks if everything is alright.

How is it that I am the one in charge?  I don't want all of this responsibility.

Well, too bad.  I signed up for this eleven years ago.  I fully disclosed my illness to Tim and he chose me anyway.  He lived through two pregnancies marred by my suicidal rants.  He pieced me back together when Sandy's death shattered me. He supported me when I told him that I could no longer work outside the home.

I hate when people say "Marriage is hard work".  It shouldn't be... marriage should be the toughest job but the one you love to face every day... not "hard work" but putting in long hours and dedication.  Don't liken marriage to a sentence.  Don't condemn yourself.  Marriage is a blessing; life is the work.

I probably won't be pleasant the next 12 weeks or so.  I will be short tempered and frequently have bouts of "Why me?" but in truth, few people have it this good.  I am temporarily inconvenienced but I am forever blessed with marriage.

A fading light

When I visited in the summers, she made pecan tarts and carrot and raisin salad, two of my favorites.  When she came for Christmas, she always brought spiced pineapple and homemade chex snack mix.  One Spring Break in college, two friends and I drove to the Gulf Coast and stayed with Gran and Grandaddy.  She made chicken pot pie and stocked the fridge with cheap beer.

My grandmother has always expressed love through her food.  Red beans and rice.  Snickerdoodles.  Chess squares.  Cheese grits.  Coffee with chicory. And later, when I was of age to drink, Yellow Birds.

So it crushes me now to know that Gran is not eating.  Her body is systematically shutting down.  She is whisping away.  My mother says her stomach is distended and constantly gurgles, audibly from the bedroom to the den.

I cannot picture my grandmother's kitchen without her in it.  I cannot imagine her house without its savory aroma.

The cruelty of the situation is that she still has her mental faculties.  Certainly, she is forgetful but she is cognizant.  She understands what is happening.

The question is what do I understand?  What will my world be like when I can't pick up the phone and ask Gran for a recipe or guidance or just a tender word?  In truth of course, we don't talk about recipes anymore... our conversations are brief and consist mainly of reports on my children.  I did just ask her a few weeks ago if I could freeze cookie dough.  I know I could've ascertained that by using Google, but I wanted to ask Gran.  I wanted her to know that I still need her, still love her, still want her help.  I always will.

All words fail me.  What I wouldn't do for caramel cake right now.

The right recipe

The summer Andrew was born, the tomatoes would not ripen.  They clung to their green skins until they split in the heat.  A slow mold had edged it way up the cinderblocks of our foundation and my brother Charlie and I drew pictures in it with sticks.  Laundry wound not dry on the line and trees lost their leaves early in August.

Gran came.  Andrew was born on a sultry late june day.  Gran was there to mind me and Charlie.  She cooked and cleaned and made me some new summer clothes.  I do not know what happened when the lights went down.  The adults spoke in heated whispers and you could hear crying in the dead of night.

We took our new baby down to Mississippi to be baptized.  We were a hobbled family at best... Sandy had left, I refused to wash my hair, Charlie wouldn't take off his ridiculous Fisher-Price tool belt.  Yet Merrie Gayle remained regal and composed.  She pinned her lush auburn hair back with tortoise shell combs.  She stood tall and proud in the dresses she had made herself.

If anyone was unhappy that Sandy wasn't there, I didn't know it.  I myself was so glad to be rid of him that I couldn't fathom why anyone would want him around.  Andrew was feted and celebrated, held and petted.   Still at night, the sobbing from the other guest room would leave you breathless.

I remember sitting in the kitchen while my mother and grandmother deveined shrimp.  The boil of the pot made me nauseous.  Suddenly, I fell ill.  And was racked with crying.  I couldn't stop and I couldn't explain why I had started.  The pot boiled over and left to myself, I bolted out the back door.

This I know is true; my father did not come to my youngest brother's baptism.  My beautiful mother wept in closets, bathrooms, under pillows, anywhere she could be alone.  Neither of my grandparents ever said an unkind word about my father.

I have learned to love shrimp and green tomatoes.  It hasn't been an easy journey but with the right amount of seasoning, coating, I can tolerate almost anything.

truth and consequences

I was unattractive during a time when looks are prized the most.  I was fifteen and my most remarkable feature was my braces.  I tried to cover my flaws but only so much can be accomplished with a curling iron and Sea Breeze.  It was all very unfortunate.

I worked for the dress shop downtown.  Mrs. Derrick employed Washington and Lee boys for manning the mens side of the store and local girls to handle the ladies.

My world had become small and dark that year.  My parents impending divorce left my family anxious and surly.  I withdrew from friends and spent a lot of time roaming the woods with my dog.  I think that is why parents asked Mrs. Derrick if I could work for her.

I was a small town girl, homely and lonely.  Peyton was handsome and worldly.  He drove a fast car and wore Ray Bans.  His chestnut hair was always slightly disheveled but his clothes were impeccable.  He was friendly and funny.

Within an instant I had developed a crush.  I bragged to friends in high school about my cool older W&L friends and before long I had fabricated a relationship between me and Peyton.  I wanted so badly for it to be true that I honestly think I fell for my own stories.  Of course, Lexington being the size that it is, word circulated fast and a friend's boyfriend, who knew Peyton, heard the rumor.  He knew of course that it was a lie but rather than addressing the issue with me, he took the news to Peyton.

Singlehandedly, I had cast myself from lonely wallflower to social pariah.

It was not long thereafter that I ended up on my mother's bedroom floor next to an empty Tylenol bottle.

It wasn't love or shame that put me into that place.  Of course I was humiliated and worse, I felt terrible for Peyton as I had besmirched his reputation.  I wasn't just simply a spurned girl suffering from heartache, nor was I  just a liar caught by her own web... I was sick.  But how could a fifteen year old explain that to the 21 year old she had just lied about?  I didn't have the knowledge; I didn't know that the beginnings of my manic depression had manifested.  I didn't have the arsenal to begin the fight.

Years later, when I was 22, a friend and I crashed a bachelor party in a hotel room in Roanoke, VA.  I heard his voice before I saw him.  I could feel the flush creeping up my face, the perspiration gathering at my hairline.  Christ, I thought, just don't let this be Peyton.  I thought briefly, hopelessly, that maybe he wouldn't remember me.  My friend grabbed my arm and propelled me through the room.  I could feel the bore of his eyes before I looked up to see him.  I watched as a slick sneer drew across his mouth.  Someone handed me a cold beer and I brought it up to my fevered forehead.  Just please, please don't let him say anything, not now, not while I am standing here, I thought.  My friend introduced us.  I hesitated, withholding my sweaty palm, waiting to see if he could bear to touch me.  "I think we've met", he mumbled and walked away.  We left shortly thereafter.  There was raucous laughter as we departed  the room, and I wept quick hot tears of shame, wiping them away quickly before my friend could see me.

You forget while you are balming your wounds, or fighting the throes of depression, you forget that you are not the only one who suffers.  It feels like it is you against the world... only it isn't the world.  It isn't the unrequited love or the umpteenth traffic ticket or the high tax bill.  It isn't the crummy job or the sordid home life or the wretched grades.  You want a culprit, you want a foe with a face but the closest you get is staring into the mirror.

Fools Gold

So I read today on CNN.com a story, and I will call it a story and not an essay, by a british psychiatrist in which she claims she conquered being bipolar by using Mood Mapping.  I paused and thought about all the times my mother had told me to "pull myself up by my bootstraps" and to "let go and let God" or to just "buck up" and I thought if I could get my hands on that dumb brit quack I would strangle her.

At 23, as I let the warm bath water close over me, I thought to myself if I had been more positive, if only I had chosen to look for the bright side, I wouldn't be high on pilfered drugs and trying to drown myself.  It was a fallacy of course.  There is no bright side to being bipolar; sure, the mania can foster great creativity and true, some artists can become addicted to the manic highs but they crash eventually.  I never would have found a bright side to any facet of life without Wellbutrin, Zoloft and Abilify.

It is irresponsible, reckless and even murderous to suggest to someone who is bipolar that they can overcome their disease without the aid of drugs.  It is ridiculous, misleading and blatantly false to suggest to them that they can even overcome the disease, period.  You don't "beat" being bipolar; you manage your disease, much like a diabetic.

Heavily pregnant with my second child, I should have been beatific.  Instead, without my armory of drugs, I was suicidal, again.  I remember sitting on my kitchen floor, painting a baby gift for my friend Susan, and weeping, the tears trickling into the oil paints, leaving a watery trail.  My mother cooked frantically at the stove, trying to feed my family as I rocked myself back and forth, wondering how on earth I would care for my 2 year old son much less my unborn child.

As Dylan Thomas wrote, "Do not go gentle" but arm yourself.  Mood Mapping might assist you but it will never cure you.  Drugs will allow you to function but they won't inoculate you.  You are a winged creature battering yourself against the cage just as a normal human being... we are asked to perform miracles every day; forgive, forget, assist, devote, donate, shelter.  Bipolar, you are blindfolded and deaf locked in a cage of thorns.  Therapy, drugs, perhaps Mood Mapping, these weapons should be used together; no one is powerful alone.

Also on the CNN website this morning was the story of the german soccer player who had killed himself by jumping in front of a train.

Depression is a sly curse; it is a hunter undeterred by the strength or beauty or stature of its prey.  It is manageable but as with any management, you must first know your tools.  Maybe Mood Mapping has a place in assisting the bipolar but a cure, a singular savior, it is not.

Taking care

The pile of the carpeting felt itchy upon my face and the ringing in my ears was incessant.  There was a full moon and it cast its sad pallor over the immobile objects of the room.  My mother's chest rose and fell comfortingly and I pretended that her breathing was a lullaby casting me off to sleep.  But the bile pitched from deep within me and I retched upon the floor.  I shook my mother awake and told her that I had overdosed on Tylenol.  I was fifteen.

The ER nurse forced me to swallow charcoal to absorb the toxins in my stomach.  I cried and feigned ignorance; I had simply taken too many capsules to conquer a painful headache.  I pleaded stupidity and hoped that I would escape the mental ward.  I winced when they jabbed the IV into my arm, but in truth, honest pain was more durable, understandable... I was scrappling with the unknown, the intangible.  Blood and physical pain were welcome intermediaries.

They released me, with a few notable head shakes and stern warnings.  I went home.  We made cookies.  It was Sunday.

In another environment, perhaps I would've shot up heroin.  Maybe I would've snorted the next available drug.  In Lexington, VA, I went back to high school and sat through Earth Science.  Lucky.  My options were limited.  There were no guns in my house.  I hated knives and was terrified of ropes.  The strongest drug in our medicine cabinet was Tylenol.  How fortuitous.  How strange.  How simple.  My options were limited.

My friends bemoaned unrequited crushes, lamented poor grades.  I secretly swelled, poisoned with my knowledge, my affliction, my fatal desire.  Homecoming, exams, Valentine's Day... the days rushed past me... and I flitted between reality and my morbid obsession, my greatest wish, the desire to end all pain, all suffering.  My parents marriage dissolved around me, my grades crumbled, my mind withered... I vacillated between hyper-productivity and vast withdrawl.  I couldn't explain to anyone what had absorbed me because I was at a loss to understand.  Was I depressed?  Was I elated?  My pendulum swung to such extremes.  I loved.  I hated.  I could dance a thousand steps; I couldn't move a muscle.

Time did not care.  My friends moved forward... awards were won, grades were earned, love was requited, rejected, renewed... and I remained.  I staggered through life.

It stretched interminably... my adolescence.  I slept.  I awoke.  I labored, I failed, I drifted, I stalled.  Somehow, I lived.

Today.  Today, I savor.  I relish.  I marvel.  And I mourn.  What if I had known?  What if someone had seen and understood?  What if someone had thrown a line?  I am 38.  Married.  Loved.  I have stared down death and put aside angst and collected my broken parts and moved on.  But what if it had never come to that?  How bitter am I?  How much of me is still unknown?  Is that different from anyone else?

There are some wounds that escape time... they never close.  That doesn't mean you can't move forward... you move gingerly, you favor a leg, you skip a step.  I walk with a limp... on especially cold days, the day my father died, the day I lost my first baby, the day I ended up in the UVA Psych ward...my gait is a little jaunty, a little encumbered... we never walk away unscathed.  Our wounds, our scars are our merits.  I have never covered my scars; it took too much to earn them.

What we are left

The phone split the silence.  He was gone.  Mary Alice had been with him until his last breath.  The soft lavender of dusk edged the horizon.  I hung up the phone and measured my breath.  What was really over? The man who was my biological father had died.  A painful battle with cancer had ended.  What else? How much would be buried with Sandy at Arlington Cemetery?

You are a child.  Your days are spent looking up.  The countless things you are told to do are followed.  You measure your worth by your parents reactions.  I lived my days to make my parents smile.  Each child does that.  Careful what you expect of your little ones... all they want is to see you smile.

I remember the glint of the fading sun, hitting the cars parked outside our house.  The air was sharp, painful to inhale.  Gone, I thought.  But what is left?  I am left... standing here, remembering a thousand hurtful things.  February, I thought.  Remember this day.  It was a bitterly cold, yet sunny day.  There would never be another opportunity to make him smile.

Gone.  What was gone?  The sorrow, the pain, the shame?  None of that would dissipate.  We are left.  We the living are left with what cannot be taken... the nebulous strings, the tenuous ties, the heartbreak, the burden.  We bury and we carry.  We put to rest the vessel and keep the contents, messy and portentous.  We sift through the sands which are remaining and grasp, desperately trying to give shape, meaning.  We clutch at what is left to us and try to decipher... anything, something.  Death is a merciless angel; there is no solace for those who are left behind.

There is no reach beyond the grave.  There is no warmth, no embrace to remedy an old wound.  Use your time wisely.  Mend your fences while the sun still warms you.  Tomorrow is never a forgone conclusion.

Careful what you wish for

We had moved to Austin and it was unseasonably cold.  An ice storm prevented a dear friend from the east coast from visiting.  Tim and I took solace in expensive dinners and wine.  We were newly wed and new  to each other in so many ways.  We tried to embrace Austin as our great adventure.

I had left a fantastic job at The National Confectioners Association when we married.  Alone in Austin, I slept late in the morning, shopped for and prepared extravagant meals and romanticized the east coast.  Tim worked long hours but brought home flowers on numerous occasions.  We drank champagne and traveled.

So we were ill prepared when I missed my cycle.  Terrified.  And bereft.  Our extended honeymoon was rapidly ending.  I called Gran and tearfully related my situation.  She understood, having gotten pregnant on her actual honeymoon.  She assured me that our new stage would be equally as exciting if a little more challenging.

I set adrift.  Suddenly, I felt alien... to my new life, to my husband, to myself.  No more champagne.  No last minute travel.  Nauseous, I could no longer bring myself to cook.   I could feel myself withdrawing from the tidy little life we were beginning to carve out for ourselves. Doubt and anger nestled in my soul and I fought myself to regain a sense of sanity. I mourned my lost lifestyle.

And then, seemingly, an answer to my misguided prayers.  I began spotting at a friend's wedding.  Immediately, the halves of my heart severed.  I felt relief... and guilt.  I had longed to be released from what I had perceived more and more as a life sentence and then, when my wish had been granted, did I realize the portent, the grace which had been granted to me.  The loss was staggering, a serrated jab to the soul.  I felt hollowed, incomplete.  And responsible.  Tim had wept inconsolably as we drove away from the hospital.  I sat, numbed and shocked by my own duplicity.  Hadn't I willed this pregnancy to its end?

Our life moved forward.  We acquired a cat, a house, frequent flier miles.  I buried my grief, and my guilt.  We learned more about wine and how to prepare fish.  We befriended neighbors and hosted parties.

The rest of the story can be summarized in any suburban housewife's diary.  We got pregnant and returned to the east coast.  We had babies and pets and courted memberships with the zoo and the Smithsonian.  We added on to the house and changed jobs and stumbled toward 10 years of marriage.

But when its quiet, when the night has blanketed and the days worries have been  eradicated, the last meal fed, the last story told, when the sheets are tucked under chins, I wrap my arms around myself.  I quiet my soul and listen to my unsettled mind and wonder... what in life are we truly responsible for if not our deepest wishes?  For when they come true, you alone are holding the reins.