A lesson

The first week of school, my son comes home and tells me, "I think I might have to break up with Olivia."

He is almost 8, but not yet.  Olivia has been his "girlfriend" since last school year.  It was a hard fought relationship since another boy liked her also.  There is a part of me that is proud that he got the girl.

"Oh yeah?"  I ask. 

In spite of his hard-fought campaign for her affections, the possible end of this relationship does not bother me.  I am reassured by his constancy, but at not-yet-8, I want him more preoccupied with a love of lightsabers than a love of girls.

"She gave me a note today telling me that we still had a crush on one another, but when I tried to talk to her, she ran away from me," he explains.

My mind catches on the word telling. 

"Well, if she won't talk to you, I think you're right about having to break up with her," I decide to handle this in the most adult way possible, convinced I have been given a lesson to teach him. "Communication is really important, and it's hard to have a relationship if you don't talk to one another."

He nods quietly, sitting on the floor in the family room; I am sorting mail at the kitchen island.  I can tell he is thinking.

"I'll try again tomorrow," he says.

"I think that's a good idea.  And remember, there are lots of other girls in the third grade if it doesn't work out with Olivia.  Besides, you have lots of years ahead of you to worry about girlfriends.  Maybe you could just take a break from having a girlfriend."

He looks over at me from where he sits, and his expression gives me a moment of panic.  The introduction of real relationships into my boys' lives terrifies me, but the thought that they won't talk to me about them terrifies me more.  I have pushed my agenda too far, I think.  He will not trust me with this again.

Very earnestly, he says to me, "But mom, sometimes it's just nice to like someone."

There are moments, I think, when each of us feels unequal to the task of parenting.  Moments when our confidence in our own wisdom is shattered by our children's naivete to theirs.  I was right that there was a lesson, but it wasn't mine to teach.
 

The thing about hitting rock bottom is you don't know you're there until you wake up on the other side of it and realize, holy shit, that was ugly.

If you're anything like me, waking up on the other side of rock bottom may also involve one hell of a hangover headache compounded by three extremely loud children and two dogs, none of whom know the meaning of personal space.

There is a picture of my husband and me on my desk. It was taken last summer, as we approached eight years of marriage. It is the only picture I have of just the two of us since our wedding. Taken reluctantly at that. My hand is on his stomach, but my fingers are curled under so the tips of them disappear into their lower halves. I remember consciously doing this, not wanting my whole hand captured in that 8-years-overdue picture. They used to call me monkey fingers. I could reach a full octave on the piano by the time I was five or six. I heard my piano teacher tell me what an advantage that was for me, but I didn't listen. I only listened to "monkey fingers."

I look at that picture and all I can see is someone wanting desperately to hide.  Not just her fingers, but her whole self.

There are cliches about not living someone else's life. But no one ever warns you about not living any life at all. Until you wake up on the other side of rock bottom and think that you can't remember the last time that your life didn't feel like one extended hangover--moving only when necessary and always slowly and methodically enough to not exacerbate the pain. You can't take ownership of anything in that kind of stupor. You can't inhabit joy when all you're trying to do is keep yourself from feeling pain.

It hurts to wake up and realize that you have been hiding.  You've built a life that you're not sure is your own, but rather, one you created because it was the path of least resistance.  And it's terrifying to think about the alternative, the coming out of hiding, taking ownership, and having to do something about it.  What if I fail.  What if I can't hide.  What if there is no joy.  What if I don't want this.  What if...

I have been trying for months to finish this.  To figure out what comes next.  The problem is that I don't know.  Oh god, how I want to step out of this, to change things, to feel some part of living again.  But then there is the uncertainty, and there is so much right now in my life that requires me to be certain and solid and responsible even when all I want to do stand in the middle of a wide open space and scream because it is all too much, too beautiful and too scary and too overwhelming and too perfect, and I don't know how to possibly experience each drop of it before it has all slipped away from me.