It's Over

The job is gone. After telling me I was the top candidate and wondering how soon I could start and asking for three references, they hired someone else. I wasn’t even sure I wanted the job, having been freelancing for them for the past few months and experiencing firsthand their disorganization; but I wanted to be the one to say no thank you.

More important, I wanted to be wanted.

They said it was a very difficult decision that came down to a different skill set, one they needed more than good writing. Of course, they had also insisted that redefining and reposting the job, which they did several months ago, was merely a formality.

All along they assured me that I was the top candidate. In the end, I was the first runner up, like the contestant who doesn't become Miss America.

I suppose I have been spared a time- and energy-draining daily commute, workplace hierarchy and office politics. Even more, I’ve been spared submersion into another organization which, despite its meaningful, nonprofit-making mission, is subject to the duplicitousness of the people who run it.

Self-employment gets lonely, but it spares me the ultimate disappointment of rediscovering that no matter how much I long to be part of something larger, I do best when I’m behind the wheel. 

First Broken Love

Her tears were so large. As she talked, they slowly filled her eyes, turning them into puddles.

I knew she’d been having trouble. I’d hoped against hope that going to college would shift her attention. And it has, some. But the trouble has stayed with her, because it is in her heart.

I never liked the boy, and it’s just as well that I was blind to the extent of their romance, because my inner mama bear surely would have tried to meddle, not that it would have done any good.

She was unable to settle down, flitting about the house, snacking, changing clothes, finding things to bake. When we finally sat face to face and started talking about her life—school pressures, roommate issues—the tears came.

It was all to be expected, I thought, recalling my own fraught freshman year.

Then she told me about the relationship that she’d been trying to end with this boy, and she sobbed.

I suppose this is to be expected too: the interminable heartbreak of a broken first love. 

Still, my girl was wounded, and all reason escaped me. I pulled her onto my lap and wrapped my arms around her, as she buried her face in my shirt and soaked it with her tears.

Night Tears

By day, I am not aware of feeling sad. I am too busy to have time to think much about how I’m feeling.

Maybe that’s why, for the third time this month, I have awakened, crying in my sleep.

Here’s what I know:

The dream that made me cry, like the other two, was about E., except in this one he was a little boy, not an infant. And he must have been sad. Why else would my breaking heart have woken me up?

As it happens, he is sad right now. He just acquired braces, a good two years after most of his peers, because years ago, when he should have been getting them, I allowed a dentist to convince me to wait. 

He is also sad because he has just learned that the horrendously painful surgery he underwent two months ago to implant screws to anchor the braces completely failed and must be redone.

So, not only is he distraught over beginning his orthodontic journey in his junior year of high school, when looking good matters more than just about anything (and dreading the prospect of it extending into college), but his mouth throbs. Plus, in a few weeks, he'll be post-op and swollen.

He was just beginning to emerge from the moody bog of the last two years. Once again, he greets me with a grunt. He is aching and he is angry.

If we do nothing else in this world, our job as parents is to protect our kids from harm and pain.

On the latter front, at least, I’ve let my boy down.

I've been trying to duck the guilt and the sadness, to skate over it, but in the end, it always catches up with me.

Jumpstart

The dust hadn’t had a chance to settle, but we went out anyway, because we’d made plans and because we thought going through the motions might put us in gear, like rolling a stalled stick shift downhill to jump start it.

We found a neighborhood bar and grill and blurted our drink orders before the bartender could even ask us what we wanted.

It had been a rough few days. The bickering had been nonstop. There had been a few skirmishes and one fight, the kind we used to have when the kids were very young and we felt so deprived, each of us resenting the other for not being more nourishing, but both of us too weary to give each other anything.

The drinks made us relaxed and chatty and before we knew it we were having a good conversation and enjoying our meal. Cruising in second gear.

Three women slid onto the stools at t the end of the bar nearest to us. Dressed to kill.

“I wouldn’t want to be back there,” I said to F, “hanging out at a bar with my girlfriends on a Saturday night, hoping to meet Mr. Right. I can’t even imagine dating at this point in my life,” I said. He was half-listening and half-watching the television on the wall. “Frankly, I don’t know how I’d meet someone if I became single.” 

We ordered another round.

Then we paid the check and walked to the concert, holding hands tentatively, silently, staying our course, downhill.

Recurring Dream

I had the baby dream again.

I dreamt I had a baby. I was both in love with the baby and ambivalent about its presence in my life. My urge to protect and nurture it was fierce. My longing to have only myself to care for, persistent.

I’d wager that most mothers secretly feel similarly conflicted. I did when both R. and E. were born: deliriously happy over their arrival and terrified about the shrinking slice of time I would have for myself. It is selfish, and human.

The equation has shifted as they have grown older. My love for them has deepened—if that’s possible—and it is easier to carve out time for myself, because they are rarely home. Yet, the conflict of tending to their needs and to my own still stirs guilt.

Which brings me to the baby dream. I usually have this dream when I’m worried about R. or E, which I was last night.

R. called yesterday, sounding blue, which is practically enough to stimulate lactation letdown. Meanwhile E., who had complained of feeling fatigued before his lacrosse game, had uncharacteristic circles beneath his eyes.

I must have gone to bed worried about both of them.

No matter how old kids get, worry is a permanent part of parenthood; which means that carving out time alone—even psychic time—is always a negotiation.

The more I think of the baby in my dream, needing love and care, the more I realize it was I.

Role Models

As I nudge up against the two week mark without exercise, hair is beginning to grow on my palms.

I can’t be immobile anymore. Walking isn’t enough. I’ve got to sweat. I’ve got to grit my teeth. I’ve got to accomplish a physical feat.

E. gets me. He works out every day. When he’s antsy, he goes to the gym. When he’s angry, he torpedoes lacrosse balls against the backyard fence. Even when he’s too beat to move, he forces himself to lift weights.

I know a thing or two about lifting weights. I was once an aerobics instructor. But it’s been a while since I did any real training. Mostly, swimming keeps my arms I shape.

But I can’t swim until my incision heals. And I can’t hike yet. I can, however, ride my stationary bike. And I can lift weights.

So I started putting myself through the paces with five-pound barbells: lat and chest pulls, bicep curls, triceps pushes. 

E. watched me for a while. He offered some routines and some corrections. He reminded me to breathe. He told me to take breaks.

My arms burned, then turned to Jello.

"How ya doin'?" he asked, concerned about my stamina. "You're gonna feel this tomorrow," he announced, impressed by my insistence on pumping iron 12 days after surgery.

I did more reps.

He cheered me on.

Priorities

He looked at me straight-faced. “I don’t drink alcohol.”

Proudly, I recounted this to the mom of one of his closest friends. She burst into laughter and asked if I also believe that tiny green men live on Mars.

E. has always melted me. Even at 16, when he demonstrates the most dishonest, manipulative or obnoxious behavior and my jaw is clenched in doubt or fury, he wins me over; so much so that, as he left for Junior Dinner, which culminated in a middle-of-the-night Coach bus ride to and from Manhattan, I told myself he doesn’t drink.

Still, I prayed: Let him stay safe. Whatever he does, let him have the good sense to stay safe.

I’m too soft. But right now, life feels too short to spend being angry at my kid for lying to me.

Of course, I didn’t think this way when he and R. were little and the tunnel of high-maintenance parenting felt endlessly dark. When the smallest missteps of toddlerhood or elementary school seemed like imperatives for punishment and moral sculpting; when trekking to playdates and parks and pediatricians left me too preoccupied and exhausted to give any meaningful thought to how different motherhood would feel at 50 or 55 or beyond, when I would be the more vulnerable one.

Now, I’m focused on thresholds: having mourned the deaths of several kids in our community, including one of his closest friends; grieved one of my brothers and witnessed the cancer treatment of the other; adjusted to the departure of R. and anticipating E’s in a year from now.

Days and weeks are a blur, and time is a runaway train. Small infractions are small. I close my eyes and hold my son close, even when he doesn't know.

Relativity

Old men pull wrinkled linen handkerchiefs from their pockets, cover their noses with them and blow. The image comes from my childhood, when I wondered why they didn’t just use disposable Kleenex, instead of returning to the same old rag.

Now I understand, because these days my nose runs all the time—when I’m cold, when I’m tired; after I’ve swum or during a workout; or when I’m doing nothing. I'm told it comes with age, susceptilitiy to allergens or whatever makes a nose drip. In any case, I'm always digging in my pockets for Kleenex or finding them destroyed, balled up and rock hard or, after having gone through the washer and dryer, plastered in long strips, like confetti, to my clothes

.

So lately, handkerchiefs have begun to make sense. In fact, a lot of adjustments to the creeping changes of age are making sense. Like trying to avoid sneezing with a full bladder; being prepared to ask my teenage son to speak slowly, lest his blizzard of words blow by without releasing one identifiable sound; or having paper and pen nearby at all times, so I can write down important information, (hoping I will remember that I have written it down).

I’d like to blame all of these incremental changes on my post-op state and the medications that are keeping the swelling and pain at bay. But, they started long before my surgery. 

Of course, being post-op puts everything in a new light. I’m so thrilled to be walking again without arthritic pain and its telltale limp, that being a little slow, forgetful, deaf or short on bladder control doesn’t really matter.