homemade time

the march of water & the waters of march

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 22:50:00 +0000

When we were young and unmarried and childless, Mike once gently said something to the effect of: Meagan, sometimes you twist a knife in the wound of your dad's loss. It's like you want it to hurt worse. Maybe it doesn't have to hurt so much.

I mean, okay. Yes. I likely was twisting an enormous dull knife in my own oozing grief-wound then. But I wanted it to hurt, because in the hurting I felt connected to my dad. I was afraid of living without stabs of pain. I was afraid of becoming an adult without his help. I missed him so much.

It will be thirty years without him on March 22nd, and eight years without Mike tomorrow.

I started watching The Pitt last night. (An aside: whoa). Anyway, after seeing lots of up close and personal stab wounds and incisions, I am happy to say with utter confidence that I no longer push or twist any knives in my heart.

Eventually I learned that I don't have to poke at and reopen something from my past in order to connect with it, because losing a beloved person isn't a singular event. It's a river that courses through my temporal physical spiritual body, where it has become integrated into the landscape. It's a stream of tenderness that moves through me and never stops. Clear water that can be shockingly cold, quietly burbling, hard to wade through, or relieving on a hot day.

I have lived my entire adult life with the cracked-open pain of grief. Who would I be otherwise? It's impossible to know, and who cares anyway? I like the person I am, easy tears and all. A throughline of loss connects me to the true nature of people, things, reality: all of it laden with love, complicated, never all one thing but containing so very many things, reminding me that time and touch and other people's eyes are mysteries impossible to fully pin down with words.

So yeah, no knife twisting required. If anything, my intention these days is to simply widen the channel. To try to welcome rather than get mad at the river when it unexpectedly overflows its banks. Like the ancient Nile (so many history podcasts in our family, forgive me) that flooded annually, leaving renewed fertile soil behind that supported an incredible civilization for thousands of years.

(I really can't stop with this metaphor, I am caught in its relentless current, somebody sit on my fingers...! No? Okay, fjording ahead.)

My children and I keep moving farther away in time from the day Mike died. It definitely freaks me out. When I notice the vastly different developmental moment we are now in, it's scary and discouraging - we are being further separated from one another and I can't make it stop. But then the river swells with the sorrow of love, as it always does in March particularly, and connects me to the child and woman I used to be, and the woman I will become, and to the people I love with a fathomless depth that have shaped me to the core, and I am reassured.

The panicky objections subside. There's nothing to fight or grasp at. I just have to allow this sun-and-shade dappled river to flow freely, and trust it won't break me.

I stopped at Mike's tree on the walk to work today. The sun was shining. There are tiny buds on its spindly branches! I rested my hands on the solid warm trunk, and felt my heart stretch - with missing Mike, and with gratitude for a more peaceful grief.

May all our nurturing tender rivers flow and flow, connecting us to one another, living and dead, and the vast ocean beyond.

snow launch

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 03 Feb 2026 06:20:00 +0000

I am sitting at gate T10 in the Atlanta airport, and my flight is delayed. I just traversed the very same hallway where this past July I said goodbye to Gabriel (who was then heading off for thirty days of backpacking in Wyoming) and promptly broke down in tears, only to be comforted by an angelic airport worker who held me in her strong arms and pretend-scolded there's no crying in my airport!

I told you about it then. That goodbye was a dry run for this goodbye. Yesterday morning Gabriel set out walking through the snow in the direction of the Appalachian Trail with two intrepid friends. They, and their families, stayed with us in a cozy rental house near Springer Mountain, the southern terminus of the trail, for a send-off weekend. When a big snowfall made it impossible for us parents to drive the hikers to the trailhead, they decided to walk the fifteen miles there instead.

He was so ready. Unplowed country roads and single digit temps were not about to stop him.

Gabriel devised this plan in July 2024. Back then, when I met him at camp in North Carolina, I was coming from an unprecedented ten days of travel with either my boyfriend, my friends, or myself in the Smoky Mountains. He'd had six weeks of his own mountain living by that point, and it gave rise to a plan: to graduate high school a year early and hike the AT during a gap year before college. He sat me down in the dining hall with expectant, big eyes to tell me all about it.

Okay, I said.

Of course I had questions: who would he go with? How would he learn the needed skills? What about his plans for senior year? And then there were the waves of heart-dropping realization: he would be leaving us sooner than anticipated. The profound sadness of losing our buoyant, funny, big-hearted boy.

But I had no real doubts. The healing effects of hikes and porch sitting and open time with people who are dear to me were threading through my body like warm light as we had that first talk about the AT. I wanted the same peace and connection to the natural world for him, times a million.

He did it all over the next 19 months: changed his classes and graduated a year early, researched the trail, learned wilderness skills, applied to college, took his friends on lots of camping trips and long walks, worked at small farms to save money, bought lots of fancy ultralight backpacking stuff. Tolerated the loneliness of choosing a path unlike any of his peers and the attendant bouts of feeling adrift and uncertain. Accidentally had a merino buff sent to Frances at Princeton. Forgot his gaiters at home. Shopped with me in a Publix outside Atlanta after we landed this past Friday for things like tuna in foil packets, instant rice, dried fruit.

As when Frances left for college, I felt a strange calm in the lead up to his launch. I wasn't worried. I just kept doing the next thing we needed to do. But about two weeks ago, on a super cold evening walk, I turned to Gabriel and said: Wait. How will you warm up when you aren't walking or in your sleeping bag? Won't you have to sit still in the snow sometimes?

He patiently explained to me how they would navigate cold and snowy weather. I asked some follow ups. My anxiety was starting to bubble. He took a deep breath, stopped walking, and turned to look at me, placing his hands firmly on my shoulders.

Sometimes, Mama, I'll be uncomfortable. And that's okay.

We hugged. Right, yes. He was signing up for uncomfortable. He was signing up for everything the earth has to offer: the cold, the warm, humidity, rain and sun, insects and roots and boulders and bears. The inviting rhododendron fairy thickets of Western North Carolina. That was the point. He wanted a glorious uncomfortable trek, all his own.

Sometimes when I'm with other families, especially those I perceive as having their shit together with two living parents at the helm, I feel self-conscious about my widowed status and varied shortcomings. I feel alone. I get defensive and think things like: well, I'd make those kinds of dinners and be able to show up to all the events and volunteer at school and arrange for lots of enriching activities if I had 100% more parenting power in this family too! I would plan and research more, set better screen limits, have some rules and actually enforce them if I had a whole extra adult who happened to love these children as much as I do helping out around here. You know, someone like their dad.

It's a weird, dangerous thought-pathway to follow. I don't recommend it.

So I was a little afraid I'd be gripped by the familiar involuntary combo of self-pity, defensiveness and fear of having screwed over my kids when we arrived at the rental house on Friday evening. The other parents, whom I'd never met, led the weekend planning efforts and seemed to know a lot more about the trail and what the boys were facing. I was sharing the house with two dads, two moms, a grandma, two sisters and a brother. Our numbers were weak in comparison; it was just me and Gabriel. Beatrice wanted to avoid this extended goodbye and stay home, and Frances was at school.

But my bad widow-mom fears never made so much as a peep. We parents whispered our worries around the kitchen island while the kids played pool in the basement and rolled in the snow outside. We turned to each other for help in discerning where the new boundaries should be, for support with the many unknowns ahead.

Laurie and Julie and I curled on couches, watching the blustering snow, gripping our cooling mugs of coffee in maternal solidarity. We all knew things would never be the same again, so we cried and laughed and told a lot of stories. Saturday was spent admiring snow, taking walks, pondering maps, comparing gear, and generally managing the uncertainty of our children starting a thru hike in the midst of an emergency winter weather event.

Gabriel and I took a long walk in the snow and talked about everything. All of it. That really helped. When we got back to the house I told him I wished we could keep walking because it was so beautiful out. He said, I love how being in nature makes you happy, Mama.

Sunday morning he and I sat on the rug and waited while the ten other people slowly got themselves ready to walk to the end of the long drive for the big sendoff. I showed him how I was wearing my necklace made of Papa's wedding ring for the occasion. I couldn't suppress my tears. I leaned on his strong meaty shoulder and thought about how he was once a seven pound person who slid out of my body with surprising peacefulness. We finally headed out, toggling between making ourselves laugh crazily with imagined absurdist trail names and allowing my tears to do what they needed to do the whole slippy way to the road.

Then we took some pictures, and then we said goodbye.

I walked alone in the snowy woods after that so I could cry and miss Mike and ask God to please watch over my capable boy. When my toes went numb and I was all cried out, I went back to the quiet house, where everyone else was taking care of themselves in their own ways.

I had to delay my flight because the roads were impassable. We all arranged to stay an extra day. This morning as we packed up the house it hit me all at once: unlike dropping Frances off at college, and contrary to my expectations, I wasn't alone in this launch.

Because ever since Mike died, I've felt my aloneness as a parent keenly at every big transition with my children. Especially when surrounded by other proud moms and dads exchanging looks and squeezing each others' hands. But this time, I felt the solid tether of love between me and my boy and the support of the other parent-friends who were in it with me. I was so grateful. I was amazed. It was a widowed mama first.

And then, after a wild, lengthy hunt for jumper cables with my new friend Dillon, I left via the long driveway myself. The scratch marks of bare trees on mountain ridges against the bright sky, rusted pick up trucks by the side of the road, melting patches of snow everywhere, blue backs of gentle mountains in the distance, a downloaded Spotify mix Gabriel's friend Leo made me two summers ago that I listened to when I was driving without a signal through these same mountains - all of this accompanied me on my way to the airport today, rooting me in this moment and in all the moments that came before and led up to it, all the way back to arriving at camp in Western North Carolina when I was nine years old and breathing in the green wet air and knowing I was home.

The woods are becoming Gabriel's home now, and his friends are becoming part of his family.

I miss him so much already, yet I wouldn't bring him home to fill the house with reading sprawled on the couch, listening to Jurassic 5 and John Prine in the kitchen, and playing games with his friends at the dining room table for all the money in the world. Mother love is mind-boggling. It may be washed with tears and edged with uncertainty, but his bright flourishing is a joy, all the way down.

not knowing

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 29 Sep 2025 02:50:00 +0000

I came down to my kitchen grumpily on Saturday morning, after a fitful night of sleep. A lone soup spoon lay face down in the drain of the little bar sink, surrounded by a spray of coffee grounds and looking not unlike a murder victim. We normally use that sink exclusively for drinking water, and so without any other dish-washing happening, the spoon had remained there untouched for at least three days.

In an ill-fated private experiment enacted by countless mothers before me, I was waiting to see how long it would languish there before someone noticed. Predictably, no one had bothered to put it in the dishwasher. I knew if I didn't move the pathetic lonely thing, no one would, and that depressed me.

But my boyfriend came for the weekend, and even though he was suffering from post-vaccine ickiness, he must have eventually done what my children would not, because the spoon and it's surrounding mess disappeared. It's for the best that he inadvertently cut my experiment short. In this particular round, I ultimately wasn't feeling resentful of my kids. I was instead experiencing a kind of familiar, floundering fitfulness before my own shortcomings as a parent: why haven't I taught them to take responsibility for their environment?

I've been having a hard time finding the balance of things lately. I'm observing certain places where the fabric is wearing thin, but I'm not sure what to do about it. It seems I should have figured out things like housekeeping and parenting and managing work and the rest of life better by now; the problem is no matter how much experience I accrue, things are always shifting under my feet.

How is it that I can feel so discouraged? Frances is at Princeton doing beautifully, Gabriel is home this fall working and saving up for his thru hike in the spring, and Beatrice is no longer a little girl who fights me at bedtime. She is twelve years old and knows how to bake an exquisite chocolate chip cookie.

But all the same, I often feel that I am wanting in my ability to captain this ship, and we are teetering on the edge of chaos. I doublebook orthodontist appointments and clients, haircuts and meetings. Empty seltzer cans stand watch over stacks of unread New Yorkers that slide around the surface of the coffee table, while dirty socks are huddled up beneath it. I can't seem to find time to take the stacks of paper recyclables to the place with terrible hours, or call my liability insurance with my questions. The toilet paper holder is broken and I don't know how to fix it. Even my body is chaotic: my shoulder hurts. Or sometimes my knees. My period is totally whack. My god, just think what will happen to us when menopause really gets underway...!

Even though I've parented two twelve year olds before, parenting twelve year old Beatrice is it's own thing. I can only learn to do this from and with her. And I can only parent her as the woman I have become, someone who lives in an older body, has more responsibility at work, and who is more comfortable acknowledging her own need for care, rest, and independent pursuits (like my new private practice and my Thursday night dance rehearsals). When Frances and Gabriel were twelve, I was willing to sacrifice my own well-being. I was taking care of my ill husband, and then I was newly widowed with three young children. Back then I didn't see any other way we were going to survive.

Now we are forty-eight. I like to see my friends and exercise; also I am navigating screens, middle school dynamics, chores, and schedules with my youngest and more often than not feeling at a loss.

I've been reading Laurie Colwin (Happy All the Time and More Home Cooking), listening to Samin Nosrat on Fresh Air, and paging through old favorite cookbooks. All of these things fill me with tender longing. I'm building a private practice while working full time (there are good reasons) and the effort and hours this requires is likely related to how freshly appealing cooking has become, ideally with the people I love perched on stools nearby. Gabriel, back from 30 days in the Rockies, has led us on two camping weekends since school began. Cooking in the woods with my family! The gurgle of the little percolator over the fire! Even better. While packing for it is anything but, life becomes marvelously simple on a camping trip. Time unfurls luxuriously.

On Saturday morning, I was still very much recovering from the over-full week and the hit my house, parenting, and nervous system had taken in response. But last night I cooked a delicious dinner from CSA eggplants and green beans (vegetables that had been stressing me out during the week, looking at me accusingly every time I opened the fridge and threatening to go bad before I had time to cook them), watched a dumb movie snuggled up with Beatrice and Thomas, and slept deeply. Today I went to church, took a long walk in a wooded park with Thomas and Ramona where I had a cry about my various worries, and baked a pumpkin chocolate chip loaf with Beatrice. Gabriel and Beatrice and I did our grateful grace at dinner, and talked about college applications and school projects and whether or not I should buy a pair of silver shoes.

I still don't know how to do this. Widowed parenting is it's own kind of thing, full of rushing love, mind reading, and gut punches - with no breaks. They don't put the spoons away, because I do. There is so much more for me to learn, so many more moments of feeling desperately at a loss ahead.

I won't know what to do. But we can always sit down to dinner - at the table half covered in homework and laundry, or under a canopy of trees - and bolstered by that ritual well-soaked in faith and love, be reminded that it's okay not to know. We find our way anyhow.

on two incidents of crying in public

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 21 Jul 2025 16:45:00 +0000

I drove Gabriel and my mother through shocking amounts of traffic to the Atlanta airport on Wednesday afternoon, arriving with less padding time-wise than we'd anticipated. It took us nearly three hours to get there from the peaceful mountaintop in Western North Carolina where Gabriel had spent the previous six weeks. The most stimulation he encountered there came in the forms of cacophonous birdsong, campers shout-singing during Morning Circle, thunderstorms, and Sunday texting on his grayscaled iphone10.

We walked from the short term parking lot to the ticketing area for United. I watched his wide eyes set in his alert, expressionless face scanning the vast space filled with hundreds of other faces and the accompanying sound of hundreds of wheeled suitcases bumping along the tiled floor, trying to make sense of it all.

We checked his duffle. We'd spent the morning packing all his gear, checking off items one at a time from a five page long list. I watched his tricep muscles tighten as he leaned over the desk to fill out an identification tag and wondered.

And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, this is not my beautiful boy.

And yet. There we were.

My mom opted to wait for us, safe in an eddy outside the women's room while we entered the rushing current of people barreling towards the TSA line.

We did not speak. I could see his mind calculating the length of the line, the amount of time needed to get to his gate, whether he'd need to take one of those trains through the airport terminals as our feet moved one after another beneath us, propelling us towards our parting.

And then we hugged goodbye. His body was tensed to face the challenges ahead. I told him I loved him and watched him walk briskly off, into the line, into the next 30 days.

I exhaled. I stood very still after he'd left my sight, and I cried.

An airport worker walked by, then slowed to look back over her left shoulder at me. She wore large cat's eye glasses with translucent blue frames and perfect pink lipstick. She said, are you alright honey?

Yes, I nodded pathetically, still crying. I'm okay.

She turned on her heel and walked right back towards me.

There's no crying in my airport! she said as she opened her arms and pulled me into a full embrace.

I collapsed into her. He'll be fine, I sobbed. I felt I had to both explain my behavior and indicate that I was still rational, but she could've cared less. She released me with some more clucking maternal noises and went off to do her job. I felt loved by this stranger, and that made me cry more.

Soon after my mom and I made our way back into the brutal summer Atlanta traffic, we learned his flight to Denver was delayed. And delayed again. And finally delayed so much that he wouldn't be able to catch his connecting flight to Wyoming, which was one of only two flights to Riverton, Wyoming each day, and so I began a series of phone calls to reschedule his travel and coordinate with his NOLS program and arrange a stay with our friends in Boulder that night.

After many hours of this during our drive north, including an extended conversation with an incredibly nice woman named Marlene who runs Gator Creek Taxi in Riverton, in the end Gabriel managed to make his flight and land in Wyoming a little before 2 am EST. He didn't have his bag, but he didn't care. He made it! And somehow his canceled shuttle was miraculously waiting and brought him to Lander. And so his NOLS adventure began.

I don't know what to make of all the ways I have been feeling ever since Gabriel sat me down in the dining hall at camp one year ago to tell me his plan: graduating high school a year early and taking a gap year to hike the Appalachian Trail before he went to college. I had arrived early to volunteer at camp before driving him and Beatrice home and I had not expected him to tell me that. I mostly just listened, impressed by his resolve, disoriented by the idea of losing out on an entire year of him at home.

We got home and he set about making it happen. He changed his schedule and status from junior to senior. He deepened his connections with a cohort of senior friends. We went on college visits. He went to prom and graduation and senior week. He applied to be a CIT this summer at camp.

I was the one that suggested this NOLS course. I knew it would be stressful getting him directly from camp to Wyoming. I knew the gear list would make my head hurt. I knew we'd miss him like crazy for 30 days with no contact at all after six weeks in North Carolina. But I also suspected it would be the kind of formative experience that stays with a person forever. And I knew I'd be a lot less nervous about the months of thru hiking with his good friend that lay ahead.

Now he's been out in the field for five days. On his third day in the Rockies, I went with Beatrice and Thomas and his daughter Junah to see our longtime favorites, Ballet X, perform their summer series in Philadelphia. I especially wanted to see a piece called The Last Glass, set to music by Beirut, of which I knew little besides it was a company favorite and featured joyful, expressive movement.

The piece is organized around couples who come together in community as a whole, but also perform a series of pas de deux that each tell a story. Every dancer has a distinct character. And while there are a variety of compelling interpersonal challenges expressed in their dances, the character who struck me most deeply - the quiet persistent center of the whole piece - was the one whose challenge stems from the fact that her partner is dead. At least that was my interpretation. She wanders the stage alone sometimes, curled in on herself in pain, looking for something that we can't see. And sometimes she dances with a man dressed all in white who continually slips through her fingers just when she seems to be relaxing into his presence. His face eludes her hands; his body slides along the floor into the wings as she helplessly watches him go. A cruel trick. The other couples danced around her.

It made me cry.

Her physicality sent me back to the weeks and months after Mike died, when my body hurt all the time. It was like taking punches to the gut over and over. Curling in on oneself, barely breathing. How memories comfort until the floor suddenly opens beneath you in the brute pain of absence (there's that cruel trick). I didn't think about those excruciating days sitting in the audience and on the walk back to the car; I rather breathlessly watched the dancers while a part of me felt that deep embodied grief.

(Beatrice, later: isn't it amazing that a dance can bring up so much emotion?)

(And there is something there too, about how I didn't want therapy and talking then so much as tending to my hurting body. I needed hands on my skin, breath in my lungs. And how now, I dance.)

After all the tears, I thought about my completely unexpected response to that dance. My mom and I had a lot of time together driving to pick up Gabriel and take him to the airport; some of our conversations centered around my kids. How they are growing up. How we made it through some terrible times together.

On one of the rare searing moments when Mike and I acknowledged that he might die of his relentless disease and leave me a widow and the children fatherless, I had a bright flash of knowing run through me. We'll be okay, I told him. I will live for them. Then we cried together.

It was true. Especially in the beginning. I lived for them.

They kept me getting up in the morning and making breakfasts and packing lunches and going to work. All I wanted was to give them respite from the pain of illness and death; I wanted to give them normal life, to cover up all the glaring not-normalness of where we found ourselves.

We have all healed and grown so much since then. But for a very long time they were the anchors I clung to for dear life. They have been a cover when I couldn't bear to be responsible for myself. At times I have hidden away behind their sparkling presences; it takes real intention and effort to allow my own priorities to be important, even now, when they encourage me to.

And now they are leaving. Our unit exists intact in our hearts and minds; not so much on the earth where we are rarely all in the same place. Frances is in Buenos Aires, Gabriel is in Wyoming, Beatrice is on an overnight trip with a friend and her family. I am sitting in a Starbucks outside Philadelphia.

That dancer also tapped my grief over my boy's departure; over the way my children rooted me in the life that I built for them from our old rubble, only to grow up and leave it.

They are becoming healthy, independent, adventuresome, brilliant, funny young adults - just the way a mother might hope they would. It's ideal; it's shocking. How could they?

I am grateful to them for helping me survive the most crushing loss imaginable. And - yes, it's true! - also grateful to them for growing up, and without their needs to hide behind, forcing me into another no-net style chapter of growth and discovering in ever deeper ways what I feel, what I want, who I will become.

Gabriel, I can't believe you left a year early. Gabriel, my heart sings for you, and for all of us.

marking the occasion

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 22 May 2025 22:13:00 +0000

I was walking down the central thoroughfare in the grocery store today after work, and slowed my pace to peer down an aisle, trying to remember if we needed canned beans. There I spied a narrow back belonging to a fair-headed man in a t shirt and black jeans. He was leaning over his cart, elbows resting on the handle as he made some similar domestic calculation. I saw him fleetingly, less than a second as I walked by, but the hunch of his shoulders was so like Mike. Something about the frame, the posture. What a gut punch. A gut-and-heart punch. I pulled over in the next aisle and looked at the teas, breathing, waiting for the tears tightening my throat to relax and sink back down to their usual quiet depths. Mike. You surprised me.

Tomorrow will mark fifty years since he was born.

And it will mark fifty years since my boyfriend Thomas was born.

It will mark forty-nine years since my glamorous twenty-five year old parents were married in Pittsburgh, and 104 years since my grandfather was born in Texas, the only child of Roy and Fay Howell, who were forty and thirty-nine years old at the time. (How long did they struggle with infertility? Were there miscarriages? How unlikely was his birth?)

I saw on Instagram yesterday that May 23rd is a favorite barre and dance teacher's birthday too. Is she also part of the mysterious cosmic conspiracy revolving around tomorrow's date, to which I may well owe the most important parts of me, the most important of all being my very existence? Probably!

In six days I will take Frances to the Philadelphia airport to fly to Buenos Aires for a summer internship. In seven days I will file into our town's minor league baseball stadium to cheer on seven hundred McCaskey High School graduates, and my shining son Gabriel will be among them. A few days after that I will help him pack many disparate items off an extensive packing list that I cannot seem to contend with yet and cram them into our little EV, and drive him to the Smoky Mountains for 6 weeks of being a CIT followed directly by a month of adventuring in Wyoming.

And tomorrow afternoon I will pick up Beatrice from four days on the Chesapeake Bay with her fellow sixth graders, just in time to take a rhubarb upside down cake to the cemetery where we can cry and laugh in that sacred place that brings us a hair's breath closer to Mike than we are in regular life. Then on Saturday we'll go to Philadelphia to celebrate Thomas's half century on this planet in style. He will be fifty years old, and that is very, very good. I smile typing it.

I have zero answers in response to the open question that is tomorrow. How can Mike and Thomas have the exact same birthday?* How can a person grieve and celebrate all at once? How can I find the vast space I need inside to hold it all?

And more than that, how I can live these impossibilities while I continue to go through the many motions required to help my two oldest children set out for distant shores and become ever more independent of the nest I have poured my heart into for the past twenty years? This nest barely resembles that one I first feathered with Mike. It's full of lanky teenage boys' laughter, skin care products, a lunatic barking dog, opinions about protein intake, episodes of The Americans, internet-fueled slang I cannot keep up with, cat hair, smelly running shoes, expensive ice cream, and interruption-peppered conversations about politics and school and relationships and history and AI and media and books and other people and feelings. These days, the only thing I'm allowed to read out loud to them is the Vows section of the Sunday Times (thanks Beatrice).

Nonetheless this nest, such as it is, holds our shared memories of being a family of five. The exquisite heaviness of all the change hits me hard sometimes. It's my forever problem - one more impossible space to live inside of - I love to see them grow, and I love them just exactly the way they are right now.

So, right. No answers. Only love-as-grief, love-as-tenderness, love-as-unease, love-as-bafflement.

In other words a heart, full to the brim.

*Astrologists, I welcome your thoughts.

don't leave

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 03 May 2025 16:36:00 +0000

Not too long ago, Gabriel got his drivers license. The fact that he passed his test and has a little plastic card with his picture on it tucked in a silicon slot affixed to the back of his phone has not magically put me at ease when I am in the passenger seat and he is behind the wheel. I am vigilant as ever.

So when we were making a left out of the alley behind our house into two way traffic, a maneuver that features terrible visibility due to the cars parked along the street, I said to Gabriel, 'you know, I still have to close my eyes every time you do this.'

'Me too, Ma,' he confided in turn.

It took me a beat. Then my eyes flew open, and I turned and punched his arm. He was already laughing, eyes wide open and fixed on the road.

'Got ya.'

He did. For half a second, I believed that when he makes that scary turn and can't quite see who is coming from the left he closes his eyes and hopes for the best because that made sense to me. Let the other drivers of the world decide if this is a bad idea. Let the winds of chance determine if I survive this left turn.

I've been thinking about it since. My younger self often closed her eyes, relinquished her own agency. Making an identity, asserting myself socially, taking risks, blazing my own trail - all of this was so hard. I longed for authentic expression, though I had no idea what that might look like in practice. Plus I was terrified of judgment. I didn't want to give anyone the chance to confirm my worst suspicions about myself.

Poor dear.

That might explain the series of charismatic and controlling girls I befriended growing up, girls who were the protagonists while I played nice girl sidekick. I could feel my own edges begin to dissolve before the heat of their glittering presence, and I liked it.

At least at first. Eventually I'd feel confined and resentful, but that initial thrill of dissolution and lightness was wildly compelling. Even as I got older and chose friends more wisely, I absolutely loved the runaway quality of good chemistry, and would happily stay up too late, skip a class, lie to my parents, whatever discomfort was required to sustain the pleasure of feeling my boundaries blur, of forgetting myself.

People who go on guided psychedelic trips often report a profound experience of oneness with everything. They could also try laughing uncontrollably in a feedback loop to exhaustion with a girlfriend as an alternate path to spiritual unity. Your ego falls away; you are all presence, all connection. It's the best.

'Your friends are your crack,' my dad once declared to me in our kitchen. I was appalled. And anguished. How to explain to him that I didn't always like the ways I accommodated my friends' whims? How I struggled to set any boundaries at all?

Of course when I fell in love for the first time, it was friendship crack times a thousand. It felt so good to take risks and break rules for someone else. To feel my wheels running off the road, to close my eyes and turn into whatever the oncoming traffic had in store.

I think that a more grown up version of this was at work in my marriage. There was the delight of merging and the relief of not having to be responsible for my whole person. (Did I admit that to myself? I did not.) Mike made the big decisions; I busily made the everyday decisions that filled in their spaces.

He picked the suburban house we bought in Annapolis, and I rode his confidence that it was the best choice for us, that we wanted the neighborhood and big yard for the kids, a vegetable garden, his native plant obsessions. And we were such a we, I could not tell you even now if that was the best thing for me or not. But I was the one pushing children on the swing set and weeding the garden while the mosquitoes drained me dry. Mike managed our budget and finances, and decreed a life of simplicity and frugality, which seemed virtuous and like something I could sign on to. I mean, I love thrifting! Eating low on the food chain! I made so many excellent pots of beans over the years.

I treasure those memories. I'm genuinely happy our kids had that landscape in their early lives. And yet. Would I have chosen it all if I was in charge? Could I even fathom then what it would mean to be in charge? To assert my difference? To say no thanks, I'd rather buy new shoes and an iced latte and some more freaking child care?

I traded some of the burden of my existential responsibility for the security and pleasure of being loved. For safety, for those delicious moments of transcendent connection. But when you make that trade, you are loved through a glass darkly. There are distortions; it's built into the deal.

You be in charge, and I will be the version of myself I believe you want me to be. My younger self made adjustments. I was afraid to say no; I was afraid to want more. Maybe I wouldn't be as lovable.

Along with a million other viewers, I streamed Conclave last week. In one scene, a priest comes to the dean of the Vatican, played by Ralph Fiennes, sharing that he has discovered information that sheds a negative light on one of the cardinals who may soon be elected to the papacy. This has come after other disturbing disclosures, and the dean loses his temper. He tells the other priest not to tell him what he has learned. He hates to talk about other priests like this. More than that, he hates to be in the leadership position he is in. Don't tell me, I don't want to know, because then I'll be responsible for that knowledge.

Leave it in God's hands, he tells the priest.

I found him so frustrating in that moment that I yelled at the screen. He was putting God in the spot I had at various times put my best friends and boyfriends and husband, afraid to take up his full subjectivity, integrity, responsibility for his own existence and duty to others. This mortal coil can be a real bitch. Close your eyes, nose the car forward. Call it piety, that sounds pretty nice. I get it.

I wish Mike never knew anything at all about lymphoma. I wish he never suffered so terribly, and I wish he had not died. And the excruciating loneliness and disorientation and endless solitary decisions I had to navigate after his death led me to learn so many things.

I met with an AEDP therapist for about a year during the pandemic, tucked away wherever I could find a modicum of privacy in my house while Beatrice slid notes under the door asking for snacks and screen time. Even so, it was transformative. In one session, I found myself, with my therapist's help, trying to listen to what my heart was telling me. It was hard. I had to be so quiet and patient. But then it came, clear as a bell. Don't leave me. My heart said, don't leave me.

When I met Thomas, I worried at myself. What about closing my eyes, what about the dissolving boundaries? Was this love? Because I kept saying when I didn't like something, or did like something, and even, with his support, sharing things that might be hard for him to hear, that might cause conflict.

I want to teach my 20 year old self and my 12 year old self what this is like. Being more fully myself in the wide world of other people with so much safety inside. It is a treasure of middle age.

I knew just what my heart meant that day. Don't leave me again. You just got here. Even in the long laughs, the long kisses. Don't go.

So I haven't.

not despite but because

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 04 Feb 2025 01:28:00 +0000

I had a long day at work. After responding to a few last emails before I packed up my things to go home, I succumbed to a very strange impulse. I opened Facebook. I do this sometimes - check texts or social media or personal email after I finish up everything for the day at my office. It's a little time-sucking bridge between work and everything waiting for me at home.

The first thing I saw was a post from a member of my online widows' group. She shared that it is her daughter's 20th birthday, and before this milestone, the waves of grief kept cresting and crashing because her husband wasn't here to behold their daughter's exquisite young adult self. And because she had promised him to keep the world beautiful and compassionate for their daughter, despite the crushing loss of him. It had been really hard to do that while carrying her own grief.

I paused at my desk, feeling those words work their way into my tired body. Frances will be 20 this summer too.

I responded to the post. I wrote that her boundless love, and her husband's, were so much bigger than loss could ever be for her daughter, who is out in the world doing incredible things. Their love buoys and supports her, offers a bright lens through which to see the world. It felt true as I wrote it.

I then abruptly closed my laptop and shoved it in my backpack, shut the door on my darkened office, and walked down the quiet hall - everyone else was already gone - out into the dusky light of evening. I went home where I was grateful to learn that my son and his friend were making dinner tonight, and so leashed up my dog for her walk with a bit of urgency in my step.

Maybe it was just the stress of the day that quickened my pace. Or the heaviness of my friend's post that I needed to move through. In any case, Ramona was initially delighted to trot along briskly with me, but when she insistently stopped to sniff the fire hydrant a block from my house I impatiently paused and waited.

I sighed. I looked up.

And there was the sky!

Bright pink feathery clouds in the west scudded across a purple-blue expanse. I watched them glide casually in the last gasp of light, as if it was no big thing to be a pink cloud in a glowing sky, as if there was nothing to see here, you people down on College Avenue going about your business while we do our regular old sunset thing up here all over again.

The sight made me catch my breath, standing there while my dog sniffed and considered whether or not to pee on the hydrant and neighbors dragged their trash and recycling bins out to the curb. Here we all were, scurrying about beneath this impossible beauty, these ethereal pink forms stretching out so close to earth. It was not business as usual! I could feel my heart yearning so hard it hurt.

I thought of my friend feeling the pain of her husband's absence, and the pain of all the years of her husband's absence. I thought of Mike, and how I saw the world when he was sick and in the early days after his death; it was so beautiful it nearly crushed me. There was nothing left to protect me from it. Ramona and I walked a little slower, said hello to the neighbors we passed with open faces. Even as the sky began to darken and the glow subsided, my neighborhood and all the people and animals and plants in it beneath the now-gray forms above remained heartbreakingly beautiful.

I was wrong. It's not that our experience of love is bigger than our experience of loss, which thus preserves the goodness of the world. It's that our love-soaked experience of loss, our broken hearts - if we're lucky - leave us cracked open to the beauty and compassion of the world. We see it, we feel it, we cannot shut it off or escape it. We perceive it with greater clarity than we did before.

It is a treasure, all of it. The faces of strangers, the sky at dusk. It glows so bright it hurts our eyes.

Our children learned too soon, a pain I would take away in a heartbeat if I could. Yet they are open to grace. They cannot unsee the beauty and compassion of the world, and now they are living into that truth. Vidita, your promise is kept.

every moment is this moment

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 26 Jan 2025 17:19:00 +0000

Yesterday morning I picked my way over the dark patch of ice at the bottom of my back stairs that has been growing by the day as the dryer vent in our alley melts the gathered snow there and sends it trickling towards the back door, where it promptly freezes in just the right spot for a rushing person to slide and fall. But I didn't! Then I avoided stepping in the forlorn little lumps of frozen dog poop in the backyard snow, made it to my parked car, drove the distance I really should be walking downtown, found a great parking spot, and made it to 8:30 am cardio barre class on time. Another triumph! (I am chronically three minutes late to everything.)

And then two minutes into our warm up, feeling the pleasant effects of heat growing in my winter body to the encouraging sounds of Beyonce, my lower back totally freaked out. Pain happened. It was sudden and intense and I felt disoriented - what? huh? - and slowed my pace. It was a quintessential middle aged moment. So much was going right. I was feeling good and anticipating coming home after class, showering, packing Frances' things into the car and driving her to Princeton, where we'd go out to lunch and have a last gasp of carefree time together before her semester started.

And then my body contemplated all this, looked around, noticed the accumulated stress of an intense week at work including many more seated therapy sessions than she is used to, noted the way I was throwing up my knees with Saturday morning abandon, and yelled: I object!

And I was all like: well, that's fine for you lady, but I want to finish this class and have my day and you can't stop me.

Yeah. Well, she wasn't into that. By the time I got back to my car an hour later to drive home, I could barely lower myself into the driver's seat. I gasped with pain. I hobbled into the house, where Frances had already lugged the big suitcase down to the back door and was getting ready to leave. The mere sight of her heavy object made my back throb more insistently.

I told her about my back as I reached for the Advil. She treated my body with a lot more kindness than I had. She was patient, compassionate, and offered to drive. She loaded all her things into the car while I carried my coffee. On the ride, every time I shifted position in the seat, I made little ouchy noises, and she made little mothery noises back: oh, oh Mama, be careful, are you okay?

And we did all the things - slowly. We talked about everything in the car, as we do. We stopped at a madhouse of a Trader Joe's and got lots of snacks and loved it. We had enormous burritos for lunch, bulging packages of comfort resting on little aluminum trays lined with brown paper. We delivered one load of things to her dorm room, where she greeted her chipper roommate who was puzzling over her course schedule and whether she could possibly squeeze into a class with 15 people on the waitlist ahead of her. We walked back to the car to get the rest of it, which turned out to be a mere yoga mat and the bag of groceries. As I opened the car door to get them, my back yelped extra hard.

I think I should probably say goodbye to you here, I told her. I need to get home to a heating pad.

Oh, she said.

But I didn't want her to go. I didn't want our day to end. So we sat in the car together and held hands and talked some more. I told her it had been such a good break. I so enjoyed having her in home mode, slipped back into family routines and conversations, rested and restored, and even though it was good and right to do it, a part of me really hated to see her slide back into school mode. I would miss her.

I felt so close to my eldest daughter. And it was time to say goodbye.

I was a lackluster hugger, what with my weirdo back, but she didn't complain. Then we kept on goodbye-ing as I stood empty-handed next to the car, and she walked away from me holding her heavy sack of yogurts and kombucha and dry shampoo, wearing her elegant camel-colored long wool coat and her beautiful dark hair in braids and looking very much the Princeton student. She smiled and said something about how I probably won't hear from her much because she'll be so busy this week. Her face was so open and beautiful. So her. I saw a flash of her bright curious two year old self, and a surge of uncomplicated and enormous love moved through my 47 year old body.

We are getting older. And sometimes, like in the Wawa parking lot adjacent to campus yesterday, time folds in and back, circling, and every moment is this moment.

* * * * *

I made it home, where Gabriel and Beatrice were also kind and patient with me. Gabriel had friends over to play a game, and Beatrice and I set up pillows and a heating pad and a laptop in my big bed and watched A Real Pain and ate ice cream together. Now I want to go on a Holocaust tour to the places in Europe where my family comes from with an unhinged depressed charming cousin too.

When I woke this morning, the sun was shining, my heart was full, and my back felt much, much better.

feeling like a person

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 22 Oct 2024 00:35:00 +0000

Hello, dear friends. Hello!

It's been a very long time since I've written. I've been out here flying free in the world, without the act of writing in this space to anchor and connect me to all of you.

And though I have missed it, the absence was intentional.

A little over a year ago, I began learning about representation in the book business world, and tapping my connections in an effort to pitch my manuscript (based on writing from this blog) to agents. I discovered many things, including the fact that loss and grief aren't particularly marketable; despite that I used every free scrap of time I could find to further my project along. Each cold email I sent was terrifying and sometimes exhilarating for me, a person who has never easily identified as a writer nor tried to push my writing beyond the safety of the fuzzy internet and out into the bright lights and bottom lines of publishing.

I'm glad I tried. But as a widowed solo parent in her forties with a demanding job who was unwilling to give up the treasure of sleep, it seemed there was never enough time to pitch and research and rewrite and package things as I wanted. Plus I secretly wasn't convinced I had something worthwhile to share. All the same, I took it for what it was, donned a classic fake it til you make it jumpsuit, and gave it a go.

I attached samples and pitched; I got a few kind and thoughtful rejections in return. One agent encouraged me to try my hand at writing about my therapy clients, as readers are far more interested in the mental health of young people than in the grief of an unknown widow.

In those days my imagination was forever reaching around, fueled by an amorphous urgency, drifting away from the stuff of life and towards the stuff of shoulds. I should write about my clients! Great idea. I'll think about that and write some notes after dinner with my kids. And I should rewrite the first chapter to make it less depressing. I should probably try to develop a social media presence and then pitch again, so agents will think someone out there will want to buy this book. Maybe I should write some op-eds. About grief. Or the pathologies of college students! Definitely. As soon as this session is over I'll start one.

Actually, I should just be a better writer. And a better self-marketer. I should be someone who is brave and talented enough to have taken some writing risks before the wizened old age of forty-seven. Let's face it: I should be a real freaking artist and yet, here I am! What am I even doing with my life, anyway?

The shimmering should-cloth that had momentarily billowed gracefully, then settled over the complicated shape of my life with a dark weight, was becoming utterly terrible.

It was good to try something scary. It was bad to feel like a failure. And it was worse still to feel that the things I work at and pour my heart into every day and night were simply not good enough.

It also kinda sucked that I was distracted by my scattered efforts and thoughts about being a Real Published Writer. I probably slid right by a lot of terrific moments with my kids over dinner.

So by Thanksgiving I decided to take a break from it all, and told myself that I would return to this in the summer, when I would have the entire month of July off work and thus time to dedicate myself anew to becoming the writer I imagined I should be.

When July came around, for the first time in nineteen years, I had two weeks to myself. Beatrice and Gabriel were at camp, and Frances was in New York. I drove Beatrice to our beloved UU retreat center in Western North Carolina to join Gabriel who was already there, then visited various friends in Asheville and the surrounding area and met my boyfriend for a few days at an airbnb in the woods. Beforehand I told myself: this will be your retreat! A traveling writing retreat. You and your laptop will occupy cafes and front porches in your favorite mountains and come out on the other side with something to show for it.

But guess what happened when I got there? I drove my car from place to place along winding mountain roads with the windows down, breathing in the green damp forest and listening to music. I reconnected with wonderful friends. Nearly every day I hiked in the mountains - sometimes alone, usually with someone special. I woke up one morning at a friends' home on a hilltop and watched two mother deer and two fawns grazing out my bedroom window. I wandered out to find Will on the screened in porch, settled in a rocking chair with the French press behind him and a heavy ceramic mug in hand, watching the hummingbirds swoop and flutter at the feeder. He had named them all. I sat beside him so that he could introduce me.

When I met up with my boyfriend Thomas, we spent every day similarly in our little cabin: waking up slowly, listening and watching, making coffee, planning a day of hiking and then setting out to find the trailheads situated off serpentine roads, drinking local beer and cooking simple dinners at the end of the day. Everything tasted so good.

Besides a few postcards, I didn't write a word. I didn't want to.

I ended my independent sojourn back at The Mountain, where I volunteered for three days with the middle school camp before my children's sessions were over and we three drove home. But on the day I arrived, I sat on the dining hall porch in the misty weather with Gabriel and his friend Emerson to hear about all they had experienced over the past seven weeks, and to tell them about my trip too.

I struggled to tell them why the past days had been exquisite, when I had been responsible for no one but myself. It's been so good, I told them. Every morning I wake up whenever I wake up. Then I pack a lunch and eventually take a beautiful long hike. Peanut butter and jelly has never tasted so good. And I sleep so well at night. My body feels so peaceful. I feel like...I feel like...

Hmmm. What did I feel like, exactly?

Sixteen year old lanky Emerson, who'd been listening with his elbows resting on his knees and his head bent low, suddenly lifted it and looked at me.

Like a person?

Yes! That's it! I feel like a person.

The boys smiled at me, and I smiled back at them. They'd had a whole summer of feeling like people. They knew.

It took a two week break from mothering, therapizing, leading my counseling service, taking care of my pets and my house and my community as well as consciously ignoring my long-standing intentions to write, for me to know in my bones that simply existing was good enough.

I had to stop doing to realize the joyful sufficiency of being.

Being alive! My animal self - fed and exercised and loved - shed her mind's layers of shoulds and not-enoughs in that gentle, welcoming landscape, and it restored me.

Adding "I should publish my writing" to my over-full life had turned it into a rat wheel. I spent last fall feeling bad about my limitations: my widowhood and unchosen solo parent status, my shaky ambition, my voice, my scant accomplishments. I could never arrive at the fullness of being alive because I was scrambling towards something imaginary that I did not have.

I haven't written anything since those blessed days in North Carolina. Not until now. Because I wanted to!

I came away from that retreat (it turned out to be one of those after all) with a desire to dig into my life just exactly as it is. To bring my full self to my work, to be present to my children and all the people I love. To get the hell off my phone and spend some time staring out the window. And to walk in the mountains when I can.

Big hugs and gratitude to all of you,

Meagan

wonder-full

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 04 Jun 2024 15:54:00 +0000

When I was a precocious toddler sporting a massive head of black hair in Dallas, Texas, we lived near a little girl who had renamed herself Wonder. My mom could tell you more about our old neighbor (including her given name), as I can only muster the fuzziest of memories. Blonde hair, skinny legs. Maybe she had accrued five or six years of experience to my two? I know I thought the world of her. We moved away when I was three.

Thinking of her now, given the late 70s timing, it seems likely that Wonder was an homage to Wonder Woman. But in my family, she lives on as the girl who wondered, who felt wonder before all this mind-blowing beauty - so much so that it became her name!

I brought that spirit with me and my kids to Costa Rica in May. I found a window between AP tests and fifth grade promotion ceremonies, between the end of finals at Princeton and the start of summer internships, and I took it. We hadn't traveled internationally together since after Mike died, before the pandemic, when we went to an all-inclusive resort. That too was a major adventure for me, recently widowed and desperate enough to avoid the Christmas holiday at home without Mike that I signed on to take my 6, 11, and 14 year old children to Jamaica all by myself in December. I'd never done anything like that before, but the outrageous price tag was well worth it. It was a safe, abundant holiday spent sliding down water slides, licking ice cream cones, and basking in the sun.

But Costa Rica was something else entirely. Now I am a solo mother with an 11, 16, and almost-19 year old. I discovered my children can help me with navigation, managing stressful moments, and decision-making. They can hop out of the car to unlock the sliding gate that let us back into our Airbnb in the dark, laugh their way through class 4 rapids, speak far better Spanish than their mother, run through a Panamanian airport to make it to our connecting flight in time to board and indulge me when I insist they watch the video for Van Halen's 'Panama' on my little phone later on the drive home from BWI's long term parking lot.

And because they are independent, capable young people, I could sit in the shade, digging my toes into the sand and watching three bobbing heads out in the clear blue Caribbean Sea, briefly imagining their conversation before turning back to my book in contentment or following the sounds of howler monkeys to take a peek at them climbing through the trees.

I wondered at the stretches of time when I was not needed. When I was simply being, an animal in a landscape teeming with other animals who made themselves known to me whenever I sat still and waited. How did those novel states of non-vigilance - of embodied affinity with everything alive around me - come to happen exactly? It was mind-blowing.

I wondered at my increasing sense of connection to my children. It was akin to their first days on this earth, when it was as if we inhabited one body, one nervous system, a fluid loop of call-and-response. Hunger, milk; exhaustion, sleep; touch and touch and touch. Except now our boundaries were blurring around our thoughts, emotional responses, stress levels. We picked up and put down conversations, told trip-generated jokes that somehow grew funnier the more times we told them, reacted to heat and hunger with the same brittle irritability.

I kept on messaging my family, closest friends, and boyfriend to share what was happening during the trip because I wanted to. Those people still existed for me. But also, on an inexplicable irrational level, I began to feel that my children were all the community I ever wanted or needed. Sometimes we tease each other about the Brogan mind meld; this was something different, and just mine to experience. As we traveled home and my children began to reach out to their friends, talk about school and graduation parties, and plan their next social days at home, a part of me felt so sad. Reluctant to let go of our enclosed world of four. You guys, let's not go home! Let's stay like this, just a bit longer!

I don't think I've ever felt quite that way before. I love my children and their company, and I'm acutely aware of how important my other relationships are, in and of themselves, as well as in support my parenting. I really love the company of other adults; I really need breaks! And yet. I didn't even want it! It made me remember my dad's palpable grief every time we came home from a big vacation. My sister and I were happy to return to our friends and independent lives; he never wanted the trip to end.

So, yes. I wondered at my big love for my children, and my utter satisfaction in their company.

And finally, because the environment in Costa Rica is so extraordinary, I never took off my amazement goggles. Every time my eyes swept over a new landscape, I was looking for something special, and if I waited a moment, I almost always found it. Wonderful! Look, hummingbirds! Hibiscus! The clouds! A toucan! My eyes were always at the ready, and my hands ready to point out the special thing my eyes had found to my kids.

I had a few experiences of seeing something out of the corner of my eye, getting excited, and reaching for one of their arms to get their attention...only to discover that the fin cresting the surface of the water far on the horizon was a snorkeler's flippers. Near the end of a steamy hike at the base of a volcano named Arenal, during which we had already spied incredible tropical birds, a rodent called an agouti hopping adorably in the forest, and unknown brilliantly-colored lizards, I gasped and grabbed Frances' arm as I heard crunching leaves and caught a flash of color around a bend in the trail. Quiet - there's something there!

I held my breath. My amazement eyes were ablaze in anticipation.

Two hikers emerged through the trees. Oh, I said. Never mind.

But actually, scrap that sheepish let down moment. Always mind. Why not be amazed? Two human beings! In this crazy jungle. Here with us. And the forty other people we've seen on the trail. Wow.

One afternoon, when I saw a little dog picking its way along the far off river bank from our raft, I was already in pointing mode. Because of the rushing water it was hard to hear each other, so I'd extend my arm and point with a flourish to indicate the amazing things I saw, like a heron flapping overhead. It didn't take long for my pointing arm to develop a life of its own. It flew out before I even registered what I was seeing. When it insistently thrust itself towards movement far ahead of us on the bank, within a second it became clear my pointer finger was not targeting a new fuzzy tropical mammal but rather a little black mutt. Someone's pet. Our guide in the back of the boat loudly objected over the roar of the river: that's just a dog!

I felt a little embarrassed. But then I smiled. I was being a baby all over again, pointing at this and that, amazed by garbage trucks and squirrels and other children, insisting on showing them to everyone else. When a baby points at a dog and looks at you with delight, amazement, and expectation of your agreement on the matter, who among us hesitates to offer it? A dog! Yes! There is a dog! Look at that doggie! Hi dog, bye dog! There goes the dog!

Babies see the world with amazement goggles. Or rather, they see the world. Later they learn to put on no-big-deal goggles. Business-as-usual, I-have-important-pressing-things-occupying-my-mind goggles. But it seems to me the beautiful constant impulse in a baby is: oh my goodness what is THAT? THAT is amazing! Let me show it to you! And then, finally, what is its name? Tell me, then we can keeping talking about it and holding it in our minds after it is gone. (Hence my futile flipping around in a Costa Rican bird book, searching for names).

So in that spirit, I dropped my embarrassment in the river and thought: I get to encounter this dog with my Costa Rican baby vision. I get to enjoy this transformation of the mundane into the incredible. That dog is amazing. It is walking around and sniffing and getting its paws wet, being super cute.

Look everyone! A dog!

an early spring saturday

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 24 Mar 2024 17:30:00 +0000

After a months-long hiatus that I feared was the natural conclusion to my nearly nineteen-year-long career as a maternal read-alouder, Beatrice surprised me last week by agreeing with some enthusiasm to the idea of reading Pride and Prejudice together. Thus began our rather agreeable turn about the room with Elizabeth Bennett, which has had no influence on my speech and writing whatsoever.

The only problem was I couldn't find a copy of it anywhere, which seemed crazy in this house. It must be in the basement, I told Bea, where so many of Papa's program books are (boxes upon boxes, filled with all the St. John's program and philosophy books I couldn't bear to part with). I promised I would search for it over the weekend, and in the meantime, I read to her off the dread phone.

We've been reading at night before bed, and in the morning on the walk to school and work. I arrived at my office on Thursday and Friday glowing, both with the pleasure of all that fantastic funny dialogue and the effects of the outrageously cold and windy March weather we've been having. The thing is, when we're reading I don't mind it at all. The shivering adds to the fun. After we part ways and I head to my office, I find the cold intolerable.

Yesterday it rained most of the day, and in the afternoon Beatrice and I went to see Perfect Days with some friends. We curled up towards each other in the reclining seats, heads and knees just touching, a bucket of popcorn tucked into the triangle of space my body made, and holding hands through many of the scenes. I wasn't sure what she would make of such a quiet movie, but she (and I) loved it, and we agreed we would have happily spent another two hours with this taciturn public toilet cleaner as he went about his solitary day, smiling up at the Tokyo trees.

After we said goodbye to our friends and came home, there was laundry and kitchen clean up to do, and some trip planning over cocktails with my mother, as she and Gabriel are taking a vacation together this coming weekend to make up for their Iceland fiasco in the summer. Then Gabriel left to play poker with friends, and my mom invited Beatrice and I to come over for dinner a little later. She left to cook, and I realized I still hadn't looked for Pride and Prejudice.

So down I went into the kitty litter-strewn basement, where one by one, I slid boxes off their shelves and tipped them towards me, balanced on my thighs while I rummaged in their shadowy insides. Philosophy, philosophy, and more philosophy. Some Shakespeare. Theology. More philosophy. What time was it? I squatted down next to the very last box and slid it out. Plato, Euclid, Aristotle, and ... a shoebox beneath these books labeled Mike's Keepsakes in Mike's handwriting. I've seen that box before, but surprisingly I can't remember ever opening it.

You can guess what comes next! My feet were going numb in my weird squatting position, we were going to be late for dinner, and I cracked open the lid. Inside were birthday cards, letters, photos. A silly poem in rhyming couplets I wrote for him on Valentine's Day in 2003. I didn't go through it all, but most of what I found was from his twenties, perhaps because we communicated more often in those days on pieces of paper.

There was a postcard dated March 6, 1998 addressed to Mike in Brooklyn, three weeks after we first got together and sent from Spain, where I was for spring break. And there was a postcard from the island of St. John, where my mother had taken my sister and me for a week-long graduation gift (we graduated from high school and college in 1998). I described some of the things we were seeing and doing, and ended it with this postscript:

I've been thinking, we shouldn't honeymoon here. Too hot. Maybe in our flabby forties, when the kids are at camp.

After I read that, I put everything back, closed the lid, and pushed the box back onto its dusty shelf.

I wrote those words when I was twenty years old, three months into my relationship with Mike. Where did I get that kind of ballsy assuredness? We loved fantasies about the future, about being middle aged with kids, about being retired (back to Brooklyn for long walks and cheap afternoon art movies and a tiny apartment!). In our very first romantic walk in the woods, that very first weekend, Mike - who was a year away from even applying to graduate school - told me he couldn't wait to be a professor emeritus. Now that would be living. To be a wise old man, give the occasional lecture, have lots of time for books and contemplation and yes, walks in the woods. He didn't mention the grandchildren gathered round his knees. We hadn't even kissed yet! But they were there, unspoken, part of his picture.

I came upstairs, told Beatrice to get ready to go to Grandma's, loaded some dishes into the dishwasher. And in my quiet kitchen with the darkness falling outside the windows I was seized with the most painful anguish. The kind that makes you gasp and curl with its impact. March 12th marked six years without Mike, and March 22nd marked twenty-eight without my dad. I feel very attuned to the absence of my husband and my father at this time of year, and sometimes intolerant of the presence of everyone else's.

Beatrice came down and could tell I was off, despite my best efforts to conceal it. What's wrong Mama? she asked in her open, caring way, and because we had had such a connected afternoon together, despite my worries about burdening her with my own grief, I told her about the postcard.

But I didn't get to have any of my flabby forties with Papa, I said. I hate feeling sorry for myself, but sometimes I do.

And then I cried. She hugged me tightly, and cried a little too.

I told her that I don't like being envious of my friends who have their dads to support them and their husbands to go on trips with. I wish those feelings didn't come up at all.

And Beatrice, who is entering a time of adolescent turmoil and growth, looked at me and said Mama, of course you're mad. I see my friends' dads do things with them, play with them, take them places, just be there, and I feel so angry. It makes you really mad! You have to just let it out!

We were in the bathroom together. I looked at her.

You have to just - scream!

I still had so much twisted up sorrow in my chest and throat and face. And I held her eyes and opened my mouth and let out the strangest noise imaginable.

We both laughed. Then she let out a big yell. We laughed some more. We tried out some pretty weird vocalizations, agreeing the low register ones felt best.

We ran in the dark, just because, to my mother's house, letting so much dark energy out our feet and our mouths, continuing to yell and make strange angry noises, cracking each other up the whole way there.

Who knows what the neighbors thought. Who cares. Mike and I didn't get our not-so-very-flabby (as it turns out) forties together, but we did get the kids. They weren't here when I wrote that postcard, and now they are! Three exquisite, loving, growing people that I cannot fathom the world without.

We found a hefty volume of the collected novels of Jane Austen on my mother's bookshelf. We read last night until we were both overwhelmingly sleepy, yet just awake enough to groan together over the absurdities of Mr. Collins. Gabriel had already gone to bed, a bit poorer after his game. I fed the cats, put the dog in her crate, locked the doors and turned off the lights. I slid my hand along the cool, smooth bannister that so many unknown people have slid their tired nighttime hands along before me on my way up the stairs, sank under the covers, skipped reading my own book and, exhausted and content, fell right to sleep.

in the chute

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Tue, 13 Feb 2024 17:51:00 +0000

It's a snowy day here, and the kids are off school. I'm at work where meetings were canceled, and so had a bit of time to think about Beatrice's upcoming birthday and look at her Amazon wishlist, which she has been curating whenever she gets her hands on my laptop over the past couple of weeks.

I never use that feature of Amazon. I scrolled down through K-pop albums and bells-and-whistles water bottles until I hit something just below Star Hair Clips/Y2K Snap On Hair Barrettes that stopped me up short: a book called Into the Silent Land: A Guide to the Christian Practice of Contemplation by Martin Laird, who was (and apparently still is) on the faculty at Villanova when Mike was in his graduate program there. And below that? The Collected Tales of Nikolai Gogol. Family Happiness and Other Stories by Leo Tolstoy. The Sources of Christian Ethics. And quite a few more titles in the characteristic theology and Russian literature veins...until I hit the very first thing that had been added to this wishlist, in June 2017. A burr grinder. That made me smile. Mike was on a perpetual mission to perfect his morning coffee.

The Laird book, the last thing Mike put on his wishlist, was added on February 8th, 2018. One month and four days before he died, just as the cancer was beginning to come back after his transplant. Five years and 360 days before today.

It's that time of year, observed my boyfriend as I cried exhausted tears last week, thinking about my dad in the midst of an AEDP training weekend that, as always, centers attachment in the therapeutic work. My beloved dad who gave me the gift of secure attachment, of feeling safe and loved, and who was taken from us far too soon, leaving me with an enduring envy of everyone I know who has a father that happens to be alive.

He's right. It's that time of year. I'm in the chute. I'm in the chute and I can't get out until March 13th, the day after Mike's deathaversary. It happens every year. I get more brittle, more weepy, a bit more anxious and angry in defensive gestures against the grief the stirs and lurches within. This time six years ago became more traumatic and painful with each passing day, and my body cannot forget.

I fantasize, as I did this morning on my snowy walk to work (even the brilliant white tree limbs couldn't deter me!), about snapping at someone who complains about child care on snow days, or having to manage things on their own because their partner is away at work, or even (god forgive me, the latest person on the planet) in response to a colleague with a living spouse who arrives late to work just because. I want to say: are YOU a widowed solo parent with three children getting to work everyday, even when it SNOWS? NO?! You're NOT? Okay well just TRY DOING THIS LIFE for a couple of days and THEN talk to me.

When Mike was sick, and even before then, he confessed to a fantasy: a stranger would walk up to him and hit him in the face. Because then he could hit back! Hard! Justifiably! It would feel amazing to hit someone for a good reason.

So, Mike, same. It would feel amazing to FREAK OUT on some innocent person who doesn't have to live this reality and stumbles into triggering me. I would love a tiny reason to inappropriately rage.

But it's been six years, you say! That's a long time, right? Will you ever stop talking about your grief? In some ways, yes, it is very long. I'm so far from my identity as Mike's wife. So far that I often feel like a different person, like I can barely recognize the woman I used to be. (That's a grief in and of itself, even though I like the woman I've become).

We're used to it. Sort of. The kids and I are used to this new life we've made together. It's a good one. But then sometimes, like on my walk to work today with my head down against the snowflakes blowing into my eyes, watching my thighs do the work of walking along the slushy sidewalk, already deep into the chute, I think to myself:

I'm a widow. I'm alone.

And it feels just as absurd and unfathomable as it did on March 13, 2018.

How did I get here? How am I alone in making every decision, caring for every sick kid, navigating every day off school and every tearful bedtime? How did this become my life? This is crazy!

So I'm used to it. And deep down, beneath that, I'm never used to it.

How old are the cats? asked a beloved friend while we chopped vegetables together, surrounded by our families on Sunday night.

The cats have been alive as long as Mike has been dead, I said casually. We think they were born two or three weeks after he died; we adopted them when they were so tiny. They're almost six.

I say these things out loud, to make bridges between my life now and my life then, between my inner life and my outer one. But sometimes it feels like I'm shouting and shaking the shoulders of the people around me. It's real! It happened! It was terrible!

It's been six years; it's been six seconds. And six seconds is not very long at all.

the golden thread

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 18 Nov 2023 16:15:00 +0000

Nearly every morning Beatrice and I walk to school. When we can't because of dentist appointments and other such errands requiring a car in the middle of my work day, we're sad. Once when I told Beatrice at the last minute that we had to drive because I had to pick Gabriel up from cross country right after work, she huffed and stomped in protest, angry as heck because without sufficient warning, I was taking away "the best part of my day!"

It is pretty good. Part of the joy of our walk for every morning of third grade, and fourth grade, and the few weeks of second grade when there was actual school to walk to, was that while we walked, I read aloud from books one through five in a charming series called The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place. Brilliant, plucky Penelope Lumley is the star, fifteen when the story begins and a recent graduate of the Swanburne Academy for Poor Bright Females. She is sent to be the governess to three incredible children who were found naked in the woods of the wealthy Ashton estate, apparently raised by wolves. Because of their upbringing, they often interject awhoooo! and other eccentricities into their language, which, in addition to a wild collection of characters including a family of conflictual, passionate Russians, makes for an excellent read aloud experience. (You may not have heard my Russian accent, but I learned it from my theatrical sister and brother-in-law, and over the years it's improved considerably).

We would coordinate our steps, I would read in an exaggerated silly manner, and we'd crack up the whole way to school. By the last block, when other parents and kids were more present, I'd be instructed to whisper the story to make it less embarrassing, or just tuck the book under my arm. Then we'd hug goodbye and I'd walk as fast as I could to work, arriving five minutes late, smiling.

Things started to shift at the end of fourth grade. The sixth and final book was getting bogged down in details and authorial asides; the action wasn't moving fast enough for us. We skipped reading a few days. And then for awhile, we seemed incapable of leaving on time, getting snappish with each other and realizing we'd need to drive at the last minute, which was demoralizing. And then when fifth grade started this fall, we couldn't even find the book that we were halfway through, and tacitly agreed to forget about it.

But wow, did I miss it. And I couldn't bear to think of us abandoning the series that we only read on the walk to school a hundred pages before the end and six months before the end of elementary school, after which our walking to school and work together days will be over forever.

Because then she will go to middle school, get a little prickly, become a teenager, learn to drive, head off to college, start a career and marry someone I may or may not like, live anywhere on the planet she chooses and call if she feels like it. I mean, really, you can see where this all goes after fifth grade. Away.

I blame Frances going to college this year (even though it has proved thus far to be a wonderful development for all concerned, about which I have zero complaints) for my sensitivity to Beatrice's surefooted path away from childhood and towards adolescence. I'm holding a child on the cusp of adulthood at one end of my reach, and a child on the cusp of teenagehood at the other. A widowed mother cannot help but feel more confused and moved by the mysterious passing of time than ever.

Beatrice has always invited my silly side. She pointed out while we were waiting for tickets to the F&M Dance concert last week that most mothers don't speak to their children in meows. (They don't? No? Well, most mothers don't have you as their daughter - that explains my behavior.) I can still wrestle and tickle bad moods out of her. We snuggle through her bedtime routine every night. But all this is changing gradually beneath our feet. And so when we found Book Six of The Incorrigible Children of Ashton Place on Thursday and I suggested we read it on the walk to school and she said, Um...why don't we just read it tonight instead?, I must have registered the disappointment on my face, deepened with mixed up hard feelings about my youngest child growing up and feeling embarrassed by such things, because she said Oh Mama, now I feel bad. I know you want to read it. We can read it tomorrow, okay?

Oof. She took pity on me. Also, my children find my disappointment and sadness unbearable; their guilt flares and they quickly apologize or in this case, submit to me reading aloud to them publicly. I try not to exploit this situation.

That said, I'm not scary or firm or disciplined. I really have no other power to effectively wield. So this morning I tucked the book under my arm and once we were across Lemon Street, I flashed it at Beatrice with pathetic, naked hopefulness in my eyes.

Okay, sure, she said, casual noblesse oblige coloring her tiny shrug of agreement.

So we read a few pages about Penelope Lumley's plans to escape from Saint Petersburg in order to be reunited with her beloved Incorrigibles, up until the corner where we now part ways, which is two blocks from school and a little closer to work, as I'm now the Head of Counseling Services and arriving two minutes late instead of five is slightly more seemly.

As we hugged goodbye, I asked, how was that? Do you think we should we do it again?

I liked it, said my five foot nearly four inches tall ten-year-old, smiling her gray blue eyes at me. Yeah.

Since we started saying goodbye on this corner, I have a habit of looking over my shoulder as I hustle towards my office, watching her walk on her own the rest of the way to school in the opposite direction. Sometimes she catches me, and we laugh and wave at each other across College Avenue. I can feel the invisible golden thread spooling out between us, sometimes tugging, sometimes long and loose, floating on the breeze. She looks so marvelous and independent in her backpack bedecked with plastic buttons she has selected that flash in the sun, dark golden hair flapping in rhythm with her gait. There she goes. That's my kid.

When I first began staying home with my little ones, when Frances was three and Gabriel a little baby, I could not believe how hard it was. At the end of every day I was exhausted. My emotional resiliency was regularly stretched to the brink, and my body was rarely my own. It seemed absurd that the hardest work I had ever done was mostly invisible - the bulk of it took place in my home, with no peers around to talk things through or share the burdens and joys. Mike had thrown himself into his new job at St. John's, which required not only long days but teaching two nights a week plus Friday night lectures and lots of Saturday prep. I was often on my own. It was SO hard, and no one knew about it! There wasn't a boss to pull me aside after a skillful response to a tantrum or peacefully executed transition to nap time and say, hey Meagan, great work. I really appreciate what you're doing for the team. Let's talk about a raise at your next evaluation!

(Okay, no boss ever said anything like that to me, but still).

That said, I've never understood when other people say congratulations to me after one of my kids has done something great. They did it, not me. Right?

But here I am with three children who are growing more independent with every passing day, who each have their own world that is quite separate from me and from their siblings, in which they make decisions and take risks and decide how much of themselves to share. It's extraordinary, really, to glimpse them out and about, living their lives. It's thrilling.

And lately, for the first time, I do feel proud of myself. There's my work, no longer invisible. It's walking to school, it's at a mock trial tournament in New Jersey, it's at a track meet an hour away. There's every time I gritted my teeth and walked away instead of yelled, every ride to an orthodontist appointment, every conflict I mediated, every bedtime routine, every harrowing pain I held and helped absorb - and there have been so very many. They are doing the hard work of growing up and becoming themselves, and I am doing the strange work of holding them close without holding too tight, doing my imperfect best to not get in the way of their growing - being here so they can be there.

Time! You are so impossible! My heart squeezes as we leave each stage behind; my heart thrills at what the present whispers about the horizons ahead.

confessions

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 05 Oct 2023 00:51:00 +0000

I went with my friend Stacy to see Nicole Holofcener's last movie, You Hurt My Feelings, when it came out in our local arthouse theatre over the summer. It centers around a couple in their later fifties. They have a young adult son and careers in New York, and their lives are overly settled when the subtle action begins. It was lovely, so funny, nearly painfully relatable (as all her movies seem to be) and I slid through it with the ease of someone on a gentle touring-about sort of ride at Epcot Center. The movie begins and ends with an anniversary date. When the credits rolled, Stacy put her hand on my arm.

I began to sob. The tears came so quickly and suddenly in response to that gentle contact, I was shocked. Where was that from? But also, I couldn't stop crying. So we sat together in the theatre while I cried through all the credits, and after the lights came up, and I eventually realized I was devastated because I would never have an anniversary dinner date like that. I would never build up comfortable habits of white lies with a partner I'd known and loved since we were very young. I would never inhabit a late middle age, comfortable kind of marriage. That was taken away, and I felt kicked in the heart all over again.

Because, I sobbed, even if I'm still with Thomas then, we won't have that kind of relationship! We won't have habits of relating, topics we tacitly avoid, and mannerisms we've established as a unit because we won't have had that long together. Also, we met in our forties and that's just different. Also he lives in Philadelphia and not in my house.

I was really mourning the mediocrities and complacencies that forty years together might have brought me. I will never know. The boring bits. The quotidian things we would talk about and the important things we would avoid. I cried for that.

With dismaying regularity, every 6-8 weeks I have what my family has come to call a Total Meltdown Day. Whenever it happens, I don't recognize it as such and announce that I am getting sick. I feel exhausted, headachey, incapable. Then the kids tell me I'm probably not getting sick, I'm probably just having a Total Meltdown Day. Typically I rest, and by the next day I'm fine. It seems to be a cumulative stress response. I hate it because it gets in the way of everything and it makes me feel vulnerable and limited. I blame what I imagine to be fast-approaching perimenopause.

Okay but really, more than that, I blame the madness of working a demanding full time job and parenting three young people without the partner I had every reason to expect would be here to help with this.

Here's the confession part: sometimes I feel SO mad. And small, and bitter. One never 'gets over' the loss of a partner and co-parent because this shit is never done. They're not there for graduations, performances, games. They're not there for college move in day. And they're not there for the last cross country meet of the season to say dad-type things to our son and cheer him on as he works so hard to come back from a concussion-induced running break. The future comes up to meet me every day, and more often than I like to admit, it can be an occasion to register my aloneness and strain anew.

Because they're also not there for a Wednesday night after work. I don't want to be responsible for every broken dryer door, dog walk, dinner, trip to the orthodontist, mortgage payment, grocery run, ride to a friend's house, or late night clean-out and devilish difficult removal of license plates with rusty pliers in the dark on the street while bass pours from passing car windows (something, truth be told, I normally enjoy) from our ten-year-old minivan in preparation for it's donation to public radio this morning. I was the only one to figure out how to make the ancient screws on the license plate budge and I was the only one to figure out what to do with all the feelings that job elicited as I fished Mike's church name tag, cds with images of pet scans and cds of bands from college, a pink cup with a lid from preschool days from the Sienna's shadowy bowels beneath a street light.

So yes, I really miss and love Mike. But there are a lot of layers to this widowhood thing, and one of them is resentment. To be doing everything alone, without the person I set all this in motion with to even see me, or know I'm doing it all, or say, oh wow, I remember that little plastic cup, it's been here all this time! I observe my peers and friends negotiating with partners about who will make dinner and what it will be, who will pick up which kid, what they'll do this Saturday. I watch one partner taking care of the yard while the other sits and chats with a friend or reads a book or explores a new fucking hobby. (Warned you about the resentment). I watch them ease into life with older kids and the more expansive time it offers, and God help me, I feel sorry for myself. Excluded.

And feeling excluded is the worst! Right? It makes me mad-sad-bad, as we used to say when the kids were little. In those moments I feel acutely the compressed quality of my days, how tired I am, the brute fact that I can only offer 50% of what my children's friends enjoy and have to rely on favors from friends and my mom regularly to make all this hang together. I feel like a twelve year old in braces with the worst, healthiest lunch in the cafeteria, sitting alone and staring longingly at the cool kids with great hair who laugh together and pull Twinkies from their brown bags with ease, not even registering the power and treasures they thoughtlessly enjoy.

Yep, you're right, cleaning out the minivan did a number on me. It sent me straight into mad-sad-bad, into twelve year old excluded angst, which was so powerful that when I woke up this morning it was still there hanging on me, pulling on my shoulders and arms and face, and that darkness kept at it until it ballooned into a Total Meltdown Day. I felt so ill that I left work early and stretched out on the couch next to my dog and ate two bowls full of popcorn and watched tv.

For like half an hour. Then I had to pick up Gabriel to take him to the chiropractor. But damn, it was great.

I don't have a tidy end to this post. I don't have a lesson learned, or a moment to describe during which the mood lifted and gratitude for all the wonderful things in our lives came rushing in. (Though let's be clear: I am very lucky, and we do have a lot to be grateful for, and the meltdown has already passed). Sometimes you just have to experience the pain of things, the darkest, most unpleasant parts, and let them be. All I can do is try to hold the insistent mad-sad-bad with compassion, and let that terribly awkward middle schooler know that yes this situation really sucks. I'm sorry today is so hard.

what we are here to do

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 22 Sep 2023 02:54:00 +0000

Recently I finished the second four-day training module in a series of five modules (spread out over the course of the year) in the therapeutic model I like best. The more I learn and practice, the more emboldened I am to commit to this approach with my clients. And the more I commit, as with so many things, the more deeply meaningful the experience becomes.

The first task of the AEDP therapist is to "undo aloneness." The idea is that facing danger and pain and cruelty, even facing our own dark feelings, becomes truly terrifying and often traumatic when we we are completely alone in the task. And so nowadays when I sit across from someone, I think about how to undo their aloneness; how to help them feel safe enough to permit me to draw closer and help them carry the pain inside so that it becomes bearable, feel-able.

Using this model has been bringing out the human in me and my clients. The really real, the tender and precious, the profoundly connected. I always say the best part about my job is how it continually teaches me that everyone is lovable and no one is boring. (The worst part is sitting in a chair all day). If I can help someone feel safe enough to be their authentic self with me, they're easy to care about and be interested in. But now, with this new level of therapeutic engagement, I am learning something more: that our deepest nature is to be in communion. Connected. With ourselves and others and the infuriating glorious world around us. To participate in love.

Big claims, I know! But seriously. I have been so moved this week by what can happen therapeutically within the felt sense of connectedness.

Last night when I picked Beatrice up from soccer practice she was upset. Without saying too much about her experience, it boiled down to feeling excluded and alone - not only in practice, but in the lonely predicament. It was that awful sense of "I'm on the outside, and no one can help me get in, and I will always be in this terrible isolated place." We were in the car together. Darkness quickly fell outside, and as she told me about practice her pain filled the car's shadowy interior. I felt a vise tightening inside; my heart ached with her ache. I wanted more than anything to fix it! To distract with humor, to point out the positive things about soccer, to remind her of the times she'd felt good after practice. But all this connecting I've been doing lately has strengthened my pain-tolerating muscles, so instead I listened and let her cry and told her I was sorry she felt so bad, that I've felt that way too, that it really and truly is awful.

We pulled up at home and walked through the gate to the back door. We set her soccer ball and water bottle and my book and jacket down in a pile in the kitchen and I hugged her close. Gabriel was in the kitchen and he asked if she wanted to talk about it, and she did, and he hugged her too. We ate dinner and kept making space for her darkness, and as we did it began to ebb; the tide drew it back out of Beatrice's beloved body leaving lightness and spaciousness behind. Then she was ready to do some problem-solving and talk a little about how to make things better. Then we watched a documentary in which someone with a lot of struggle in life manages to try anyway, to have new experiences and take risks. Beatrice really connected with that.

My children's pain is as hard, maybe harder, than my own to bear. Holding their grief during Mike's illness and after he died was the most difficult thing I've ever done. Sometimes I was afraid their pain would break me, perhaps in part because I had to carry it alone, without Mike. Widowhood introduced me to the most acute aloneness imaginable.

And even though all I wanted then was to cry in someone's arms, someone who wouldn't advise or judge or try and shake me out of it but simply be there with me, I can forget that truth when my arms are the ones doing the holding. Or rather, deny that truth. Ignore it.

Because damn, it can feel nearly impossible to be present to another human being! To offer yourself fully and completely, and stand in whatever true thing is happening together without trying to change it or push it aside. I mean, wouldn't it be easier to get some takeout? Check your phone? Yes, it definitely would!

But the being together, the attending completely, might be the most exquisite gift anyone can give anyone else. And when you give it, you are nurtured by that generosity too. Because you are together. Because the whole experience is shared. Because we aren't meant to do any of this alone.

Maybe you are thinking: uh, yeah, Meagan. Haven't you figured this out yet? What with all the parenting and caregiving and therapizing and being a person in a world full of people for forty-six years? Did you really need a weekend of talking secure attachment and core emotions with a bunch of emotive therapists to figure out that love is more or less what we are here to do?

And to that I say, well, yeah. Maybe I did. Because love is SO HARD and heart-stretching and scary that I need lots of reminders and inspiration all the time. I need a lot of support! I need an enormous zoom room full of therapists. And people like Thich Nhat Hanh and Richard Rohr and Glennon Doyle. And my family, clients, coworkers, boyfriend, friends, ancestors. September skies, cool mornings, sunlit leaves. Also novels and music and documentaries about people who are brave. Tearful daughters who sit in the car and tell me how much it hurts.

I can't just show up with my whole heart and stay there without a thousand hands at my back.

Thank you world, for reminding me every time I forget, and teaching me anew.

saying goodbye

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 27 Aug 2023 20:27:00 +0000

Four years before this photos was taken, in my first year of graduate school, I had the good fortune to land a field placement with Fox Chase Hospice on the northern edge of Philadelphia. My supervisor was wonderful and the nurses were hilarious, compassionate and wise. When I walked into the office after a home visit one afternoon feeling discouraged, unable to help a family resolve their longstanding conflicts before their mother died as I'd hoped, a seasoned nurse named Debbie took one look at me and sighed. "People die the way they live, Meagan."

That stayed with me. People die the way they live. It isn't fair or reasonable to expect them to do things differently while going through a whole-being transition, a whole-world change. Just getting through the day during times of loss requires tapping into our deepest reserves; it's nearly impossible to find the energy and wherewithal to do things with a new spirit or perspective. Of course sometimes we do, despite the odds. Maybe that's grace.

I kept thinking of Debbie and dying the way we live, in the lead up to Frances's college move-in on Friday. Yes, everything was about to change forever, and yes, we had been anticipating it for years and named countless big feelings about the event as we moved ever closer to it. But we were still us. We were handling this little death the way we handled life - with flashes of anxiety, dark humor, conflict, dog walks, domestic chaos, and ice cream. It seemed that something really big should happen, something to reflect back the momentous cusp we all stood upon. A ceremony of some sort? Collective weeping and gnashing of teeth? A brilliant rainbow arching over our house?

But no. Nothing unusual happened. Life kept barreling us ahead, and then on Thursday evening Frances and I lugged everything from her room down the stairs and into the car, occasionally looking at each other in bewilderment and asking, "what are we doing?"

Was she going to college or something?

Friday morning we woke up early and got on the road, and it was good. We arrived on campus and followed the mobs of parents and students and figured out where to park, where to unload, how to find the dining hall. We kept doing the things, and the things kept moving us closer to saying goodbye.

And when we did I felt it deep down in the taproot of my heart. I felt it all: hope and excitement for my daughter, gratitude to see her already finding her way in a beautiful and extraordinary place, a hint of pride in the path we have walked together, the role I was given to play in this exquisite human's life, and ragged grief over the brute reality of the moment: I would go home without her.

No matter how long we anticipate these shifts in our lives, it's shocking to become a parent, to lose someone after a long illness, to say goodbye to a child. To undergo a structural change that you can't reverse. Anticipation is its own thing, its own difficult path one can't avoid. But the event itself is something else entirely. And the word 'prepared' has no place here. How can you prepare? You've never done this before!

For instance: I didn't know how much I would miss Mike as I moved Frances into her dorm room and watched her chatting with her new roommates. I didn't know how it would ache as I walked amongst couples on their way to parent orientation. After our big goodbye hug outside her dorm, I walked to the waiting car in a lot on the far edge of campus and cried. Those tears were not so much about saying goodbye to Frances as they were about saying goodbye to her without Mike.

Then as I crossed the enormous parking lot, he sent me a memory. When Frances was born, less than an hour old, Mike had a vision. It was a flash, a scene, one so powerful that he never forgot it. He saw her as a tiny, frail old woman (not so very different from a tiny, frail newborn) with fine white hair. She was in bed and people Mike didn't know were in the room with her - except he did know them, because he knew that small crowd of adults and children were her family. He was seeing her on her deathbed, surrounded by nieces and nephews, grandchildren and maybe great-grandchildren too, and they were all loving and supporting her as she made the passage.

But that wasn't all. Mike saw the scene, and knew he would be there too. He was there too. It was as if time spread out in every direction in the moment of Frances's birth; everything was happening all at once. Everything was. Impossibly, the love he felt for a tiny person he had only known a matter of minutes was the portal to briefly entering everything-is time. Mike was aware that he couldn't possibly still be alive when Frances died, an old woman surrounded by future generations, and he knew he was going to be there with her all the same.

I remembered all of that, and I thought: if you're going to be there when she dies, why not be here for this passage too?

People die the way they live. They live the way they die, too. We are all dying all the time: to our old selves, to chapters past, to relationships and narratives and identities. But the small deaths we experience, like saying goodbye to Frances, can lead to bounteous, ardent new life. She is on her way. We all are.

Driving and crying through New Jersey, I talked to Mike, her proud papa, her first teacher and the biggest nurturer of her bright intellect. I don't know what dead people do all day, but after I remembered his vision from her birth, it seemed possible that I wasn't alone. It seemed possible that the only person in the whole world who loves Frances like I do - who listened with me to the music the sound of her breath and a cricket outside the window made as she slept nestled between us on her first night on earth - he was somehow there with us. With her in her beginnings, with me in my endings, maybe even with us forward and back through all the moments, and somehow helping me ensure that when Frances sleeps her last night on earth, she will also be surrounded by boundless love.

the longest day

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 29 Jul 2023 19:37:00 +0000

Yesterday was my official last day off. Our offices reopen next week, and even though I chose to delay my return and squeeze in one last trip, I felt the usual clutching sadness about Friday. My last real day of summer. Last day to wake up whenever I wake up, drink tea and bustle about in the quiet kitchen, go to barre class in the morning, spend open time with my kids, deal with one of the endless house things on the list I wrote on the back of an envelope that sits on my desk by the window in the living room, spend a few minutes flipping through a magazine or cookbook on the couch. The last day to live inside the languid pace of summer.

Sure, Gabriel was leaving in the afternoon on an epic trip with my mom to Iceland and we had to gather all the last minute items he needed to pack. And sure, Beatrice and I had to pick Frances up at the airport in Philadelphia that night, back from her trip visiting a friend in the Pacific Northwest. But there would be so much time in between it all to let summer seep in.

I woke up and came downstairs where I found Gabriel clad in a tank top and shorts and his golden skin, burnished over countless summer runs, getting ready to go for a bike ride. We chatted for awhile and made a plan to head to Target later for sunglasses and an eye mask (recommended in a land where the summer sun barely sets). I didn't notice when he slipped out. Beatrice, the most teenagery ten year old, sleeps in later than any of us and so while she slumbered on, I put on my leggings and headed out the back door.

Just as I slid into the only parking spot left on Prince Street, four minutes before class was due to begin, Gabriel called me.

Hi honey, I said. What's up?

Mama - inhale, pause - I got hit by a car.

My body reacted before my mind could register what he said. My breath seized and caught in my chest. He told me he was okay, some police officers and neighbors were with him, and that an ambulance was coming to take him to the hospital.

I tried to breathe and steady myself. I told him I'd be there in two minutes.

As I headed down Orange Street towards the corner where he'd been hit, I could see two police cars and a firetruck double parked nearby, and just as I pulled up, an ambulance arrived. There was Gabriel, standing in the middle of people in uniforms that I didn't know, the side of his face scraped and bloodied.

I could barely figure out how to open my car door.

I ran to him awkwardly, confused by what was happening, thanking the police officers, halfway taking in what they told me. They offered to drop his bike off on our porch. I was aware that Gabriel wanted me to not freak out, and so tried my best to not freak out. Some other people seemed to be waiting to make sure my son was okay, and when we left to go to the hospital ourselves, they waved and smiled at Gabriel and wished him well.

For awhile we were quiet in the car on the way to the Emergency Department, a path I'd driven too many times with Mike when he spiked fevers. Then Gabriel explained the accident, and how so many neighbors and people walking by had stopped to help. The only time I heard any emotion in his voice was when he said, Mama, everyone was so kind to me.

By the time we'd made it through triage Gabriel was sliding back into his usual self, cracking me up with jokes about the hospital and the police. They made sure the whack to his helmeted head hadn't done any serious damage and tentatively bandaged up his scrapes. The doctor told me that he could go to Iceland, just skip the hot springs with those oozing wounds. We came home around eleven and Gabriel suddenly said, I haven't even had breakfast yet!

Oh! A caregiving task, that would make me feel like my normal self! But as I made him toast with almond butter and apples and boiled water for tea, my hands started to shake. I put down the plate and leaned on the kitchen counter, took a breath. Gabriel got up and pulled me into a hug, wincing a little when my head grazed the bottom of his injured chin.

It's okay now, Mama, he said. It's okay.

Later he showered, Beatrice wandered downstairs to discover all the drama she had missed, and I left for Target, adding antibiotic ointment and bandages to my list. I called my mom and told her what happened. I came home and worked on his suitcase. I noticed Gabriel reading on the couch. I went to sit with him and found he was feeling shaky himself now that the adrenaline had worn off. Exhausted, beat up and unsteady. I worried about putting him on a plane with my mom.

But they did it. Beatrice and I performed an upbeat two person wave for them in the heat as they pulled away, and then Beatrice dropped the act and told me how stressed and strange and ignored she felt.

So we did what any Howell Brogan would do in such circumstances: we planned to bake a peach pie with the many peaches we'd picked the day before, and went to Wegmans to collect supplies and cheer ourselves. It worked. We got sushi for dinner, picked up extra to bring to Frances at the airport. She complained about having to come along in the car. I explained everyone we know is on vacation and I wasn't going to leave her at home alone all night. She said why can't I just stay home. I said because I want your company.

And just as we closed the door behind us, the darkening skies opened and lightning began to flash. We were soaked by the time we got into the car - even with our umbrellas. I thought of the water in the basement. I thought of the dog all alone. I thought of Frances in that sky. I clutched the steering wheel and joined all the other freaked out drivers who cruised along at 42 miles per hour on the Pennsylvania turnpike, while Beatrice and I listened to a blessedly diverting audiobook.

The plane was late. I turned on my hazards as the rain continued to pound us and parked along a ramp near other cars waiting for their late-arriving family and friends. Unwanted thoughts of plane crashes and how I would find out flashed briefly in my mind, which led to similar thoughts of Gabriel and my mom crossing the Atlantic. Was the storm following them too?

But Frances (and they) survived. She finally landed. They had gate checked her bag and there were problems getting the bags from the plane to the baggage claim; they weren't allowed to take it out when there was lightning. We waited. Frances ate her veggie sushi and remained faint with hunger. We waited more. Beatrice draped her arms around my shoulders and hung there, all out of complaints. Throngs of tired, vaguely annoyed people surrounded us. We went to the office and waited in a line to talk to two incredibly good-natured women who were joking to each other that today was the wrong day to come to work. We decided to have them deliver the bag rather than wait indefinitely, then lingered in the airport wondering if that was a dumb idea. In the end, we left bagless and doubtful about its eventual arrival.

We went through a McDonalds drive-through around 11:30. I accidentally slopped bits of my McFlurry into the cup holders and smeared ketchup on the steering wheel as I drove through more relentlessly stormy weather. We made it home by 1. I apologized to the confused dog, who seemed to think it was morning and our arrival marked the day's beginning. The girls slept together, and I climbed into bed with a big book, asking its words to soothe my still-shaky hands.

There is an undeniable loneliness in being the only parent to three precious people. No one else loves them like I do and no one else can, because no one else is ultimately responsible for their exquisite beings. That job belonged to me and Mike, and now it's mine alone. Tapping the reserves of energy and calm that yesterday demanded pulled me down below the surface, down to where my solitary solo-parent vulnerability that normally putters along agreeably began to heat, to throb, and find its raw center.

Thanks for listening, and easing all my tattered edges. It's a gift. And now? Off to bake a peach pie.

the uncomfortable cusp

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 29 Jun 2023 17:12:00 +0000

Here I sit on the old L-shaped couch, surrounded by a bulging duffel, piles of laundry, backpacks, travel information gathered for my unaccompanied minor when she flies home from camp later in July, the napping dog, the black sharpie for labeling. I've been packing and organizing all morning for our week vacationing in Asheville followed by camp pick up (Gabriel) and drop off (Beatrice) at the beloved UU camp of my youth.

It is a rare thing, to be alone in my house on a weekday, with only the sounds of foot and car traffic outside the window to give some texture to this silence. Normally I long for a morning like this. Even if it's spent doing laundry and ticking off packing list items! But damn if I don't feel melancholy today.

Also. I feel very annoyed that I feel melancholy. I mean, wtf Meagan?! This is a beautiful thing you have going here! Why you gotta mess it up with the whole heavy pit in your stomach furrowed brow thing? What a waste!

(Isn't it outrageous when we judge ourselves for feeling bad and thus feel way worse? The dreaded second arrow, it gets me every time.)

It's just that everything is changing. Frances and I have been getting all her health forms together for Princeton, and yesterday she found out her roommate assignment. Gabriel is away at camp and not here to talk with me about what to make for dinner. Beatrice is turning into a new kind of being, taller than ever, stunning me with her bright insights and new flashes of anger.

I told my boyfriend I was worried that being on my own for five years had ruined me, that maybe I'm no good at partnership anymore. Maybe I've grown too attached to my own clannish family, my own ways of doing and avoiding things. As I grow closer to him I have to contend to what it means for me, a person who was with her husband for twenty years and then alone for five, to share the fretting and pleasures of daily life with someone else. To let that someone else help! Hoo boy, that one's big. Trusting someone else to help. How strange to recognize that having to do all this shit by myself - even though I often do it through gritted teeth - is something I'm reluctant to give up. It's my shit, darn it. Don't touch it.

I mean, do! Please! Please help, please hold my hand. I'm exhausted, really. I can feel so mixed up.

Everything is always changing all the time, in fact everything has already changed all the time, and I'm just struggling to catch up and adjust. I know, I know, that's just life. Flux may be the norm for everyone everywhere all the time, but when you let the fullness of it touch you, it still rocks your world.

Sending my oldest child off to college is a fullness-of-flux kind of moment. Raising my children on my own, and before that raising them while caring for my ill husband, and before that raising them with a husband who worked way too much and left the lion's share of it to me influenced my nearly 18 year long habit of being pretty cavalier about the whole 'kids grow up' business. Like, yes. They do. They should. That's the idea. Fly little birds, fly! Can't wait to see you soar while I get back to chilling in this nest on my own, enjoying my own agenda and time and space for once.

But here I am in my empty house and I feel terrible! About two months ago, after Frances returned from a Taylor Swift concert and played me all her saddest songs, it hit me with shocking force: she's leaving. They're all leaving. I knew this, I've always known this, but not like that. I cried and cried. Frances, Gabriel, and Beatrice are the center of my world, and what will I have (what do I have) to show for all these years of pouring my heart into them once this house is truly empty? Have I written any books, become a world class therapist, done anything fancy or impressive with my time?

They will leave and I will be old and alone and unimportant. At least, that's what the dark whispering suggests when something external triggers her release within.

This moment is a bookend to those early Homemade Time years, when I was mostly staying at home with my little children and wondering how I would ever return fully to the world of adults. Could I pass as functional, productive? Could I conduct conversations with nary a reference to my children? Could I ever do the things I dreamt of doing when I kept on loving these children so damn much?

I am always keenly aware of the things I want to do and can't, because when you're working full time and parenting three children alone and have to remember trash night and figure out how to deal with water in the basement there isn't time for a whole lot else. Yet I sit here and think about the dining room full of lanky boys playing D&D, the sleepovers, the family dinners with friends, the porch sitting that leads to chats with neighbors, the way one of the kids reading on the couch next to the dog fills the room with quiet peaceful energy. And while I can't travel on my own, go off on writing retreats, read lots of novels, pick up a new instrument or spend as much time in movement classes as I'd like, there is so much here and now. So much that takes from me, and so much that fills me right back up. It's an abundance that is always changing. I might not have much to show for these overflowing days, but it's good to remember I am part of it all, and it is all part of me.

Fullness of flux, fullness of life. The thumping reggaeton and the birds singing and the whoosh of tires outside my window; a rippling current that never ends.

I've missed writing to you here.

moving forward

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 17 Mar 2023 14:09:00 +0000

We moved into a new house last Saturday. It's around the corner from our old house, and promised peaceful mornings with its second full bathroom and spacious dining room to accommodate friends waiting to ride to school. It has an open living room that, while still full of boxes, has already facilitated more time together. The neighbors on this block are tight, and have welcomed us kindly. I hear buses rumble by on the street below my bedroom window in the early morning and find it a comforting sound. On this street we are more pulled into and embraced in the flow of life.

Yet what big change agrees to leave one's tender hurting places alone? Our first morning in this house fell on the five year anniversary of our lives without Mike. I decided to welcome that synchrony; while it is a terrible day, even more than that it's a day about honoring and remembering my children's papa.

Since I last wrote here in mid January, I became the Head of Counseling Services and thus took on a lot of new responsibilities at work. I bought this house on January 31st (renting to the sellers until March), packed up my house (including many unexamined boxes and objects brought in from our life before cancer), celebrated Beatrice's tenth birthday, helped Frances through college and financial aid applications (still waiting on most of those decisions), prepared my old house for sale, marveled at the sheer quantity of objects we possess, and moved into this new house. All of these things were accomplished with the loving support of an army of friends, it's true. But seriously. A week into my new role at work, it hit me: now I'm the mom at work and at home. Shit. All the things eventually fall into my lap.

I may need a bigger lap.

(Possibly already in the works, given the copious amount of ice cream, chocolate and wine this season has led me to consume). (Though the anxiety, plus carrying countless boxes up and down stairs, may be effectively counterbalancing those influences).

I'm telling you all this just so you know. Just so someone knows that all this has been really, really hard. I've worried about so many things. My adulting capacities have been pushed to the brink. My brain is operating at a pretty sad pace, and I forget every 12th word I intend to utter. And when I can't think of the 12th word, I say fuck. Like, when I can't think of the word radiator or router I say instead the fucking thing. As in: you guys, we're going to have to learn how to bleed the...the...the fucking things.

And my kids look at me blankly. Okay, Mama. On our way out to dinner on Sunday night in honor of Mike, after the taxing moving weekend, after picking up the cats at a friend's house and stopping by the cemetery with them and Lulu peeing all over her carrier in a total fit of feline freak out and all of us screaming in the car and frantically rolling down windows because of the astonishingly awful smell, after all of that, I called my car a fuckhead when it wouldn't shift into reverse immediately. The kids started laughing.

Mama, the common usage is fuckface.

And also, you've said the f word 800 times since yesterday morning. It's really not like you.

Yeah, well, I'm not really like me right now.

But I took this week off of work. And I have had days to unpack, to organize and figure things out, and even more wonderfully, to be alone in this space, and I am beginning to be me again.

As I unpack boxes, I've been touching so many objects that were once essential, and now no longer are. Yesterday I found a bulging binder given to us by the hospital, with neatly labeled dividers in Mike's handwriting, full of insurance documents and experimental treatment options. A notepad tucked into the righthand side whose first sentence at the top was How chemo works. Mike's notes from our first meeting locally, before treatment began. A clattering collection of PET scans tucked into a pocket.

I had to touch all those pieces of paper and shiny CDs that once held the possibility of Mike's survival, read all those reports and look at all the words he dutifully wrote. Then I threw it all away, feeling weightless and strange inside.

This week I've found cards made by much smaller hands for me and for Mike, photographs, abandoned craft projects, journals. I've found lumpy ceramics, colorful paintings, and so many picture books that no one is young enough to want to read anymore (with the exception of George and Martha, which I think we will always want to read). I read those books aloud hundreds of times, snuggled next to one or two or three rapt, quiet, freshly bathed children. I love those books. They hold our history.

But we have too many, so I filled a box yesterday with beautiful, beloved picture books and put it outside our house with a 'free' sign. And the flow of life plucked them up and took them along with it, and within an hour it was empty. So I filled the free book box again.

I'm saving the most special ones. But you can't save them all, can you?

All these objects are comforting, tender reminders that it was real. We were a young family with regular young family cares and pleasures, then we were a suffering family struggling to live with cancer, then we were a grieving family struggling to live without Mike. It all really happened. Here, all around me, in half empty boxes, is the proof. Letting go of the evidence isn't easy.

One of the perks of this week off work has been picking up Beatrice after school and hanging on the playground with other parents while the kids play. The other day, Joshua and I were talking about how hard it is to be consistent when it comes to discipline, structure and routines. The authoritative aspect of parenting was never my strong suit.

But, said Joshua, I try to remember that the most important part of all of this is joy. That's what I want to prioritize with them.

I nearly cried.

Me too, I said.

I want to always make space for ... for the fucking thing. The joy. That's what moving to this house was about, and why all the angst is worth it. Keeping the doors and windows open, having plenty of places to pee, extra space for guests, places to curl up with a book or watch a movie or eat a meal. A home where we can be alone and be together. Where we can know where we've been, accept who we are now, and not be afraid of the changes and growth to come.

radically precious you

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sun, 15 Jan 2023 18:28:00 +0000

Even though I myself have sought out all of the following influences, sometimes in life it feels as if a story is trying to reach you. Like a message is being broadcast, and your job is to listen and make sense of it. Over the past week or so, here are the forms the message has taken, the result being that I am very stirred up, cracked open:

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver, read compulsively late at night all week and just finished at my kitchen table while a group of boys organize themselves for a game Gabriel invented in the next room

The prophetess Sonya Renee Taylor on We Can Do Hard Things, listened to on a drive to Philadelphia on Friday

Tracy Kidder's profile of Dr. Jim O'Connell in the NYT Sunday magazine, read in bits since last Sunday

A Man Called Otto, viewed big and tall in a movie theatre of all places yesterday

Going to church this morning with Beatrice, a Sunday service for Dr. King, a gathering of imperfect people imperfectly registering the pain of injustice and the yearning of coming closer to heroic people who have gone before us.

All of these things have left me a bit agitated, shaken. I have been thinking about our radical responsibility to one another, and the radical belonging and love that comes with taking up that responsibility. I've been thinking about how I shirk that responsibility and pretend like I don't know about it all the time, and how that shirking takes a toll.

I remember telling Mike how, for better and worse, I had been transformed a few months into my first social work job at my old clinic. I could never not see people again. I'd heard too many stories, I'd sat with too many people that occupied corners and libraries and food pantry lines, the kind I once walked past in various cityscapes with just a shiver of discomfort that I would quickly shake off once something else occupied my attention. But now I saw those people everywhere. Did it change my behavior, no longer being able to pretend they weren't there? Not really. Though in those days, I could greet some of them by name.

I am aware of the times I hold back friendliness and welcome, when I offer a more shuttered version of my face to a stranger or acquaintance. It's because I can sense their need, and I'm afraid of becoming responsible for them - except of course in a real sense I already am. I'm afraid of having to care for them, of having to make more space when my scanty available space already feels paper thin.

My job offers me a way to lavish people who come into my life as strangers with attention and love, in a way that feels so very right, deep in my bones. Meeting another person's eyes and inviting their truest self to be with me like that. I welcome their vulnerability. But it's safe because there are boundaries around the relationship. My responsibility is limited. As many have reminded me over the years, a therapist is not supposed to take her clients home with her and feed them dinner and tuck them in at night.

And I'm not taking issue with that! I couldn't do my job without those boundaries, and I'm very attached to my job. Plus I have my own dear children to care for at night. But damn if all these stories and voices I've been letting in this week haven't been reminding me that everyone is someone's beloved precious child, just as precious as my own, and I love those three people so much it nearly breaks me on a regular basis.

Do you see where I'm going? How do we live in this world that tells us it's fine to walk right past another person's pain, when we know in our guts it's really not? And how can we begin to live more aligned with our own radical preciousness, and every other person's radical preciousness, when it's genuinely hard to get everyone ready and out the door in the morning and remember the orthodontist appointment and the work emails and the friends to check in with and find time to walk to dog and there's laundry six loads deep in the basement? And also. I need a little time at night to be with myself in the dark in the tiny glowing circle of yellow cast by the clip-on book light, a novel balanced on my chest, my breath easy and slow. Otherwise I just couldn't do it all.

I can read late, when the day's duties are done. But then I go and read a beautiful book about a hungry child. Geez. Are the day's duties ever really done? I mean, okay. Time is finite. Love is not. But how else do we express love, if not through gestures enacted within the bounds of time?

I felt like this in my teens and twenties. I think I'm supposed to have outgrown it by now. But since it appears I haven't - and I honestly do feel a little adolescent right now - I'm genuinely interested to know: how do you think about liberation, your infinite connection to others, the ever-present invitation to care? I don't really mean do you volunteer on Sunday afternoons or a write a check to Unicef.

I mean: what is it like for you to be a precious hungry child in a world of precious hungry children?

crybaby

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 23 Dec 2022 15:57:00 +0000

Yesterday I joked to a friend at the playground after school that I hadn't checked Class Dojo in a week because I couldn't bear to. Not another bit of school-related app-facilitated information could make it through the sinister shine of my phone screen and into my brain. Thus, Beatrice didn't know to wear pajamas and bring a stuffy for the cozy fun last day before break and was dressed in her customary jeans and sweatshirt.

Hahaha! She feels left out and it's because I couldn't make myself pay attention. Haha!

Jokes are funniest when they are true. Uncomfortably so is best. I had arrived at the playground in the drippy cold weather pleased with my decision to take the day off so I could luxuriate in the after school experience. I'd make Bea happy, see friends, and get to feel like the kind of mom who can pick up. But alas, instead I was the kind of mom who doesn't keep up with school communications and whose daughter is annoyed at her because of it.

I felt that heart-tug again submitting college applications with Frances (why haven't I done more to help?), and watching Gabriel get a ride that I could have given him a half-hour later but not at that moment. I feel it all the time, even though I know that I am doing the best I can and my Oura ring reminds me that I average between 0 and 4 minutes of 'restorative time' daily - meaning I never stop. And I don't like that! I desperately want regular down time, for reading and writing and watching TV and staring at the ceiling and cooking up plans and ideas. I am not proud of being stretched thin. In fact I hate it.

But even more, I hate that my kids only have me. I don't want them to be made aware of their status as children of a single parent, which translates as having 100% less parental and adult support than they came into this world with and could reasonably expect to continue enjoying for the foreseeable future. They arrived as children possessed of two adults who loved them more than anything and would coordinate to accompany them through preschool tantrums, difficult homework, athletic events, class parties, college visits - two adults that would coordinate in such a way that they wouldn't have to be achingly aware of the sacrifices involved in being that kind of parent, an involved and engaged parent who shows up on time, knows where the game is, can give other kids rides and contribute to the bake sale.

I know Mike is dead. And I know I am half of the adult force I once was. Yet I can't quite accept that reality for my three children. That stubborn refusal means I feel terrible, just terrible, whenever those brute facts break through everyday life.

Friends will reassure me that even with a co-parent they too drop balls, and can't always make it to events, and generally struggle to balance work and kids. And their husbands are useless anyway! They never remember dentist appointments! Uh huh. Yeah, totally. And I want to spit at them. And cry. Like a three year old who is told her fear is irrational. There's nothing to be afraid of honey! My mistakes and limitations feel like evidence of my children's loss-in-action; theirs do not.

This is our fifth Christmas without Mike, and I feel the pressure as much as ever. If I don't make a proper Christmas for my kids, their half-orphaned status will push against the day from the inside out and threaten to topple all the chocolate and presents and the whole damn tree festooned with ornaments from other times. As if it weren't bad enough to have Papa's stocking hanging below the stairs, empty on Christmas morning. (Though it seems worse not to hang it at all alongside the rest of our stockings). I don't want this holiday to be a shred harder than it naturally is. I want them to feel loved and cared for, to feel joy without the pinch of absence.

Thich Nhat Hanh teaches this method of self-compassion: when we find pain inside, we can hold it tenderly, imagining it to be a crying baby. There is no need to argue with a crying baby, or to scold or reason or shake a finger at her tear-streaked face. All you can do is hold her gently in her inconsolability, waiting for the distress to peter out within the safe container of your warm arms, and the quiet, fatigue-laced peace to come.

On the fourth day of the mindfulness retreat I went on last fall, in my growing and unexpected comfort with meditation, I noticed some nasty thoughts come up there on my round cushion. You aren't really meditating, Meagan. You aren't doing any of this, you're pretending to do it, you're pretending this is meaningful. You're not even on this retreat. You are so full of shit.

Oh man. I felt an immediate, familiar sinking, a heaviness, a recognition. It's so true. I am totally full of shit. I can't believe it. How could I have proceeded this far without remembering my own glaring fraudulence?

But then, with nowhere else to go, I sank even lower, past the thoughts to a deeper recognition. Wait. Hang on just a minute. These fears are just more crying babies inside! And they need me.

So I stroked their hot red cheeks, and and held them in my arms. I nursed them, an imagining that brings the same deep embodied calm from the many years I spent nursing the crying babies who live outside of my body. Eventually they settled, and fell sweetly asleep.

That day I learned in my bones that there is no pain that can't be transformed by love.

And now, over a year later, when I am a little bit more grounded than usual, I remember that. I do believe treating the pain - the smallness, resentment, grief, and fear I feel for my children (and by extension myself) as they grow up in a community of friends who mostly enjoy two involved, imperfect parents - as the nursery full of crying babies that it is is the only way forward. The only way that promises healing.

To pick them up, whisper shh, shh, shh in their tiny delicate ears, tolerate their heaviness in my arms. This is so much harder than crying to my boyfriend how impossible this all feels sometimes, or attacking housework with aggressive desperation, or waking up far too early to get things done so I feel some sense of control. I imagine I'll always do those things sometimes. But this season, I want to remember to occasionally pause all the maneuvering, the pursuit of an illusory dream of greater efficiency, the strained effort to be two parents when I am only one. It is advent, after all. I am trying to pause, invite tenderness, and wait.

happiness

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Thu, 17 Nov 2022 23:22:00 +0000

I went out for lunch yesterday with a woman I don't know very well. Her husband died three months ago and she bravely reached out to me after a mutual friend connected us; I was touched and truly happy that she did. We talked about widowhood and how impossible the first weeks and months are, about cruel paperwork and finances, about her husband and how terrible it is for her to do things they once did together without him.

She wanted to know how I did and do this. When do things got better, how do they get better, how does one make it through this darkness? If only I could offer her a blueprint, a map; instead I shared some books, resources, people who were helpful to me. I told her it stays awful for a long time and I honestly don't know how I journeyed from there to here, but I did, and that's saying something.

Then she asked if I was able to enjoy things. Can I feel happy now? Does it come back?

Oh, yes, definitely, I told her. It comes back. Just not the way it was before. Now joyful moments are lined with tender ache. When one of my kids triumphs, when I behold a beautiful sight or experience something new, a part of me squeezes because Mike is missing it. I can't share it with him, I can't look across a room and smile at him with a quiet mutual understanding that yes, this is marvelous. That absence lends a bittersweet cast to moments that were once simply happy.

It's been a packed week. So many things have been happening, and I've been scrambling to keep up. During the height of busy-ness I wasn't sleeping well, and by last night I was completely exhausted. I got into bed, read half a page, fell deeply asleep within minutes, and woke up eight blessed hours later to the sounds of my teenagers getting ready for school.

Under the covers in my quiet bedroom it was warm and dark, and beyond that, out in the hall, it was bright and chilly. I couldn't force myself into that space. So I called to Frances, who came in to hug me and explain she and the rest of her morning ride-to-school crew were leaving early to stop for coffee en route. Gabriel waved from the hall on his way downstairs. Buried in my nest, I waved back. I listened to Frances, Gabriel, Tahra and Leo bustling around in the kitchen and the cats wandered into my room to walk back and forth across me and meow their wonderings about when I would come down to feed them. I was undeterred. I scratched behind their ears peacefully.

Wrapped in a blanket, Beatrice came in and stood next to my bed, looking down at me and my uncharacteristic sloth with mild concern.

Mama, it's really time to get up. We'll be late.

Yes, but it's so cozy in here. And I like listening to everyone downstairs.

She paused, then cautiously lifted the edge of my comforter and felt for my arm.

Oh Mama, she smiled. You're so warm.

I beckoned to her. Come on in, I said. Just for a minute. We won't be late.

She slid under the covers and stretched out long next to me, then rolled to face the painting of a comet on my bedroom wall in her little spoon position while I wrapped an arm around her ribs. Our legs arranged themselves into their customary alternating stack. We sighed in unison, warm and safe in the dark, while below the teenagers shouted to each other and slung backpacks and clomped heavy feet on the way out the front door. In their wake the house grew suddenly quiet, and sighed along with us.

Beatrice's back nestled warm against me. My nervous system whistled a happy tune and kicked a pebble contentedly down a tree-lined dirt lane, blue skies overhead. My bed was the very best place in the world to be, and my awareness of the ticking clock - pulling us towards animals in need of breakfast, the busy morning ahead, the evening of dance class and guitar lessons and making dinner and even towards Bea's fast-approaching adolescence and greater physical independence from me - didn't diminished it's best-ness in the slightest. It made it even better.

In that precious moment, I felt perfectly, peacefully, simply happy. It lasted a few minutes, after which I threw off the warm covers to force us into action, and the day's cogs and wheels began whirring away.

But the feeling lingered. I haven't forgotten. I'll tell my new friend the next time we have lunch.

everyday heroics

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 05:10:00 +0000

After my last session this afternoon, I searched my inbox with the words 'teacher conferences' and found the itinerary for my evening at the high school. It started in 30 minutes, and would last until after eight. The only problem was that I hadn't arranged for anyone to pick Bea up from dance at seven.

I'd asked my mom a few hours earlier when I finally confronted the fact that I could not be in two places at once, but she couldn't do it. And I couldn't bear to ask anyone but the woman who gave me life and is biologically determined to love me for a favor. Not after the cascade of asks prompted by Tuesday's cross country banquet which coincided with dance class drop offs and pick ups, my minivan not starting that morning, a sick babysitter, losing my phone for four entire hours while I was on call, yesterday's early dismissal from school, arriving a few minutes late to every session I had today because I squeezed in an orthodontist appointment and Beatrice's teacher conference before my morning sessions and those ran late, and needing a ride for Gabriel to get to his guitar lesson tonight.

It seems that all I have done this week, actually this life - at least this widowed single parent life - is ask people for favors. Sometimes I can't make myself ask, even though I'm thinking about it before I go to sleep for the six nights prior, not until the last pressured minute, and then I have to ask in a much worse, less respectful of other people's time kind of way (I can't believe I'm asking this but is there any way you could grab Bea after swim tonight blah blah blah I appreciate it so much blah blah blah I can't believe I forgot to ask earlier UGH GROAN put me out of my misery already make me stop putting exclamation points on the end of the countless thank yous I text a day so I appear somehow less threatening and like the kind of person you can't help but take pity on and don't resent having to help all the time.)

So yeah. There was nothing to be done but cancel the last four conferences of the evening, since Beatrice was already at dance class and could not be left outside in the dark in the middle of Lancaster County when it was over. I scrambled to sign into the school website to use their messaging system and sent a bunch of apologies to my kids' wonderful teachers, probably with lots of unnecessary exclamation points in them, decided I'd finish my notes tomorrow, and ran out to the parking lot.

A new favorite album filled the gray spaces of my car as I drove from my office to the high school. I slowed to a stop at a busy red light and my eyes rested on a beautiful pair ahead of me on the sidewalk. They were a young mother and her skinny seven or eight year old son, walking side by side. They both had excellent posture, and they both wore capes. Wait - what? As I rolled closer to them, I could see from behind my windshield that their capes were in fact a white towel around the boy's shoulders and a pastel striped pillowcase around the mother's. They held the linens clasped around their necks so that they fluttered behind them. They wore the slightly off ensembles of recent immigrants or refugees, people I often met with when I worked in the clinic, dressed by church clothing drives or the mission at the other end of town. They looked a little out of place yet so regal, the way they proceeded together in those capes.

I suppressed an urge to roll my window down and smile and wave and say: you two look like superheroes! To somehow salute them, acknowledge their brilliant presence on the cracked city sidewalk in the golden November light, already fading fast, a sight so arresting that it tethered my racing, fretful mind back to this body, this earth.

When the parts of me came back together like that all at once, I cried. A thousand tender thoughts moved like a rushing river through me, unformed awarenesses and memories more felt than truly thought. They were about motherhood and childhood, perseverance and untold stories held quietly inside, the kind my clients entrust to me, about love so big it can't help but push against the edges of your heart and ache there until something gives and the space expands. About aloneness, about fearing you aren't enough for your children and knowing you are at the same time, and about how everything changes and changes and sometimes the best you can do is stay close to the people you love and walk proudly through it in a cape of your own design.

It was sudden and surprising. I felt my throat tighten, the gasp and sting and heat. The light glowed green, and tears gathered as I drove on. One overflowed, spilling a hot trail down my cheek that then cooled in the evening air, becoming a soothing stripe just as comforting as a cold pack fetched by one of the kids when I hurt myself.

When I left work, I wasn't feeling like a superhero at all. Then I saw two superheroes right there on the street, shining their humanity so brightly that I could feel my own, such that the mere sight of them let all the you're not doing enough and you're a burden slide out of me in a few big sobs. I made it to the school, where I ran into other parents I know and met a few of my kids' teachers. They like and support Frances and Gabriel a lot, which made me smile. Beatrice enthusiastically described her final across the floor sequence on the way home from dance and though I couldn't really follow, that made me smile too. Then dinner, dishes, laundry, tv, a snuggly goodnight.

It was enough. More than enough: it overflowed.

the descendants of hwyel dda

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Sat, 15 Oct 2022 02:41:00 +0000

Sometimes I share a show with one of my kids. During September, aka The Ailing Month (colds, then my first and rather brutal round of still-lingering covid), Frances and I watched Better Things. Okay, after I tested positive and kept getting sicker, I left her in the dust and finished it on my own. But it was still fun to share.

She and Beatrice return again and again to Gilmore Girls, which I sometimes dip into with them. Beatrice and I loved watching Ghosts. We all watched Never Have I Ever together. And for years Gabriel and I have been watching The Last Kingdom.

It's about Saxons and Danes in late 9th century England. The Last Kingdom has its immediate pleasures, like the sexy cast covered in leather and furs and tattoos and aerial views of warriors on horseback hurtling towards each other on green hillsides. But there are other pleasures in it for me that ripple out, like remembering watching this show with Mike after the children were in bed when it first came out. And how Mike enjoyed my historical curiosity and, while sick, discovered a mostly-forgotten titan of historical fiction from the 1950s, Alfred Duggan, who wrote a novel about the life of Alfred the Great. He found me a copy and I gobbled it up, telling Mike about Wessex for days (and I happened to have just read a Thomas Hardy novel set much later in a fictional Wessex; synchronicity!).

There's the pleasures of sharing that historical curiosity with Gabriel now, and looking up real figures from the show like Aethelfled, Lady of Mercia and just the other night, Hwyel Dda, a king of Wales who is, we are convinced - based in no small part on my grandfather's stories - our ancestor. King Howell the Good! Yes! That's our guy.

On this general history kick, last night Gabriel told us about the lead up to World War 1, which he is studying in school. He made sense of the tensions and allegiances that developed following the Franco-Prussian War for Beatrice and explained to me, a wizened old woman of 45, that Prussians are simply Germans. Holy shit. I always wondered who those Prussians were. I mean, they rhyme with Russians. Yet...no. My mind was blown.

His storytelling skills are considerable, honed over hundreds of hours as dungeon master. In time we pulled out the enormous atlas for some visual aids. A sheaf of charming imaginary maps in Frances and Gabriel's childish hands from years ago fell out of it. We moved them and the forgotten dinner plates aside to spread the maps of Europe out on the kitchen table and trace old boundaries on top of new ones. Gabriel explained that Tsar Nicholas, King George, and Kaiser Wilhelm were cousins, yet even intimate family connections couldn't stop the war.

I got distracted and began studying the pages of the atlas that showed European UNESCO world heritage sites, dreaming of our vacation next summer. I found a gorgeous photograph of craggy Skellig Michael and its impossible monastic settlement founded by Saint Finan in the 9th century.

Mike, check this out. It's Finan!

Poring over another map, Gabriel didn't hear me clearly. Neither did Beatrice. But I did. A little shock registered, then a momentary grasping of my heart. It just came out in the excitement of the moment. I called Gabriel Mike. That never happened before.

He looked up at me, a question on his face. I felt very still.

I just called you Mike by accident.

I could see him bracing quietly for some unknown big emotion to escape from me as I stood there looking back at him, still leaning on my hands, flat against the photographs on the table. A big feeling from Mama could upend the pleasurable momentum, moving through stories and maps and summer plans.

It's okay, I said, wanting to reassure us both. That was just...strange.

Finan is our favorite character on The Last Kingdom and we are gripped by fear for his life during every battle scene. Obviously Mike would feel the same way about charming Finan. And Skellig Michael's name comes from the archangel, just like Mike's. And sometimes we teasingly call Gabriel Dad when he is being very Papa-like and giving Beatrice a hard time for wasting food or reasonably suggesting consequences for wayward sisters and pets. And, you know, perimenopausal or covid- or age- related brain fogginess naturally leads one to screw up loved one's names all the time.

But still. I said it like I expected Mike to come into the kitchen and look over my shoulder.

Because a part of me did. And in the end, after the disorientation subsided, I decided I treasure that part of me, formed over twenty years, that hasn't gotten the memo. That still lives connected to my old way of being, a part whose first thought after encountering something cool, beautiful, exciting, tied to our shared interests is: I can't wait to show Mike.

And how very tender, how very lucky, that we hold so many of those shared interests in common with our children, fellow lovers of this mysterious, precious world, glorious descendants of Hwyel Dda. I can't wait to show them, too.

in which the relentless passing of time, made glaringly explicit by the first day of school, left me beset by melancholy

noreply@blogger.com (Unknown) — Mon, 22 Aug 2022 17:40:00 +0000

Yesterday I came in from walking Ramona in the cooling humidity, the still air just like the air of a thousand last-day-of-summer-vacations past, and went upstairs to find Beatrice asleep and drooling on my bed, stretched across bare mattress and a tangle of stripped dirty sheets. It was around noon. Beatrice never naps, but she'd been up past 1 am the night before.

She and her brother arrived in Philadelphia Saturday afternoon after a week at Experience Camp. After I picked them up, per Beatrice's insistence, we went in search of fast food. On our way, Gabriel told stories about camp. When I asked Beatrice for her stories, she started to cry. She told us through tears that she didn't know why she was crying and also didn't know why she couldn't tell me about camp even though she wanted to. When I pulled over so that Gabriel could pee, I climbed into the backseat with her and hugged her. Then the tears slowed. I could feel her hot limbs and face begin to relax against me. When Gabriel got back into the car and I made a move to slide back into the drivers seat, she clung to me. Just a few more minutes Mama. I eventually had to remove her little iron paws forcibly.

Eventually we made it to an odd, desolate Wendy's where my mom met us with Frances and her friend, fresh from the King of Prussia mall, and we swapped. She took Beatrice and Gabriel home, and I took the girls to see Brandi Carlisle back in Philly. Which was, as you might have already guessed, a completely amazing show. But we got home so late and Beatrice was waiting up, confused and fretful. I told her to get into my bed and close her eyes, an order she gratefully complied with. By the time I joined her I felt too exhausted to sleep. I read for a long time, listening to her even breath.

Then Sunday was the last day of summer, and as I wandered in and out of my house and yard a part of me kept looking around and asking: shouldn't you be doing something? Shouldn't you have taken Beatrice to church for the blessing of the backpacks? Bought more lunchbox snacks? Offer some fun end of summer activity? Isn't this house a mess? Wouldn't you feel better instating some order, or buying new shoes for someone?

But after talking with my wise boyfriend I mostly let go of the anxiety that fuels my wheel-spinning and gave in to what my tired, melancholy body wanted, oppressive notions of effective, responsible mothering be damned. Beatrice and I re-watched Never Have I Ever with her siblings, read from our favorite book series, and shared some of those stories from camp that weren't ready to come out on Saturday. I read the paper in bed while she listened to an audio book. We did nearly nothing all day, and what we did do was mostly enacted in a horizontal position.

This morning, I drove Gabriel and his girlfriend to high school for their very first day. He forgot his sneakers and we circled back for them. We asked someone holding a clipboard in a parking lot where they should go and they jumped out of the car, heading in two directions, anxious to arrive on time. Good luck! I called after them. I looked down and saw Gabriel had forgotten his water bottle in the car. Beatrice and I figured his cross country coach wouldn't let him collapse from dehydration in practice later. Right?

She and I went home to gather her things, and then walked to school. Now I'm realizing that I forgot to put a note in her lunch. Sigh. On the first day of fourth grade too! As she explained to me earlier, we're both in denial about this transition so avoided dealing with all the related preparations.

I watched her line up with her friends in the playground before entering the school. I met and chatted with a mother whose son is in Beatrice's class. I looked around the sea of adorable children and parents and felt so heavy. When they filed into the building, I reluctantly shuffled towards my office.

The tears gathered in my throat and sat there, waiting. As I passed the front of the school, a goldfinch fluttered right into my field of vision, swooping in showy wild loops before landing on a wire over the school parking lot. I began associating Mike's spirit with bright male goldfinches after he died; this one really took my breath away.

Mike! Gabriel is in high school, tomorrow is Frances's first day of senior year. It's all happening so fast. Please. Look out for them, make sure they're okay?

But the way that goldfinch was making himself known to me, alone on the sidewalk, meant I really didn't need to ask. It was a visitation meant to reassure.

And like a child lost in the grocery store who begins to cry once she is finally found and safe again, that's when the tears came, and they kept coming all the way to my office. When I walked in, my boss Lauren took one look at me and asked what was wrong.

My kids went to school, I sobbed. She smiled. I cry-laughed.

They did? They went to school? That's terrible.

I know. They're the worst. They keep growing up and they never stop. Can you believe this shit?