The Rejection of Globalized Longing

My mother is having surgery tomorrow, which arouses a primal feeling that has nothing to do with what I think of her. There is an irrelevance of the woman's choices or how difficult those choices have, at times, made my own.

There is a reflexive feeling of, She can't be leaving. And, If she leaves, what happens to me?

When I think more about that feeling, my mind turns immediately to this man I share a home, and a life, with. For want of a better pseudonym, let's call him Guy. That is after all what he is.

Guy lost his father when he was only four, and was left with no memories of him. There are black and white pictures of a grinning man holding a small baby. Guy's father died of lung cancer in his late 40's, at the beginning of his small son's life. The man in the picture looks like the life of the party--the guy you would be working your way towards because he was so charismatic and fun. His son knows only this two-dimensional character, and sometimes works very hard at being the same.

His mother struggled, raising two children alone with no education and no experience other than being a homemaker. On a cold November day in something like 1983, Guy's sister was diagnosed with Hodgkin's disease. She was almost 14. For two years the little family struggled, and after a long fight she survived.

As simply as that, with nothing guiding them but the passage of time, Guy spent the rest of his growing up in small apartments in a green town on the coastline of Connecticut. I've seen many of these long-ago homes on visits to his hometown. He drives me along small streets that dead-end at the beach, pointing out various windows: When we lived here, that was my bedroom window...that apartment at the top was ours, and we loved that the living room windows faced the water.

So they lived, in the sunshine of this rocky shoreline, a small town, high-school-football-team-marry-your-high-school-sweetheart existence. Winters were long but the short summers glowed, as things glow in our memories.

Guy's mother died suddenly, when he was 25. She was a sickly woman and years of self-neglect caught up in one short burst. She left him and his sister from a small Connecticut hospital bed one night, shortly after a visit from Guy. It came as a shock to the siblings, regardless of how impossible to ignore her decline had become.

Guy and his sister mourned their mother's loss mostly in silence, both quietly tending a shared understanding that they were, at the end of the day, what each other had. They each married and had children; he divorced, leaving his son except for every-other-weekend visits that continue to this day. Life marched on, as it tends to.

His sister fell ill again in her early thirties. Cancer came back, this time in her breast. It claimed her this time, over the course of one long, shocking year. He was alone then, in a way that I believe most of us cannot comprehend.

Guy married again, divorced again, and gradually wound up where I found him--a single suburban father who occasionally dated, but not much in the past while. His work was mostly math and he spent his days in spreadsheets and financial models, but he wrote beautiful stories at night. He longed for the weekends with his son, two days of boyish abandon that had become their routine of almost a lifetime, and also continue to this day.

This is what flashes through me when I call my mother and no one picks up the phone. She is supposed to leave for the hospital tonight for that surgery tomorrow; something that has been seen somewhere inside of her is not favorable and must be looked at up-close. Volumes could be written about that sentence alone.

But as you know, the phone just rang and rang. No one picked up.

I think of Guy, my loving funny man, and the struggles we have had in finding peace with one another. There has always been passion between us, but it has taken many forms. When it takes the shape of anger, you'd do your best to stay away.

A friend of mine has said, It's a shame we never talk to our friends about the wonderful things our partners do. We'd never call a friend to say, He surprised me and had screens installed because I was upset that the apartment was always too hot or work was so horrible that when I came home crying, he sat me on his lap and made me talk until I was laughing. It would even feel weird to say it.

I believe that I have found a good man, and an equal partner. He is very flawed. I am not someone who sits patiently with the flaws of others, despite having very good defenses for my own. Together, we can be combustible.

We are also deeply loving, and silly, and grateful, and sharing the wish than that this other person us would walk like this beside us forever.

So the phone just rings and rings, my man sits at his desk on this sunny Sunday morning--he is angry at me, but pretending to be engrossed in his computer. I am angry at him, too. We pull so far away from each other in these moments that no apartment could be big enough for the two of us.

I am trying to imagine what it would feel like to be as angry as I am and to also know that there are people you feel like you should be calling because it's Sunday, people you were wishing you could call, but they will not pick up the phone. There are people you miss who will always be gone forever. It has been X or Y many years since their voices rang in your ears.

I will go to him now with my anger and my sorrow--both that we are fighting and that there is a corner of his soul that will always be missing something he doesn't have, can't have, and has lost forever.

At Milford Train Station

I missed the train home from the beach one weekend last month; my boyfriend was driving and we watched the damned thing pull out of the station from 20 yards away.

It was the end of a beautiful weekend, sunny and June, we’d celebrated his birthday with friends, and drank, and laughed, and relaxed into each other all weekend. Or that was how it felt at the time.

And then we missed the train by under a minute and the man who I spent all weekend kissing departed abruptly and the angry stranger I‘ve come to recognize as his ever-present sidekick appeared in his place.

Does it have to be this way? I asked quickly, hoping we could pretend it had been—well, what it was: one of life’s inconvenient bitchy things. A missed train. A lost hour—mine, not his; he was dropping me off at the station and leaving to spend the rest of the afternoon with his son. His day hadn’t lost an hour, mine had. I thought that simple question might be enough of a jolt—maybe it could snap him out of what I was afraid was about to come. Maybe we could agree that while a missed train meant re-thinking my day, it certainly would not mean catastrophic life alteration.

I was mistaken. It was catastrophic, apparently. The train was pulling out of the station as we pulled into the parking lot, and all hell broke loose inside that car. I started crying but he didn’t notice. He was enraged. The beautiful weekend was gone, the relaxed Sunday was gone, a catastrophe had indeed occurred.

Because we'd underestimated the traffic and I had missed a train.

The color of his rage, I imagine, is bright red. He sees nothing but it. Nothing, no one else exists. Not me, certainly.

This is when I thought, There is something we give up when we love a person who is very angry, and not willing or able to acknowledge his own anger.

For one thing, we give up some of the spontenaeity of life. We have to let go of the previously held belief that we can react honestly to what’s happening; it might trigger a drama that it is not worth living through. In that moment in the car, there just wasn’t any room for me to say, Damn, I really wanted to be home by 4.

We give up the ability to feel our own anger, as it really is, in moments. It is so overpowering, this need to extinguish another person’s rage, that often we forget to feel what we feel first—or we’re bullied out of it, or we’re frightened by the consequences of how many hours or days or fighting will follow if we do, or we’re dreaded out of it. Oh god, no, please don’t make him start. I’ll be funny, I’ll be accommodating, I’ll be compliant—just please don’t make him start.

Eventually, for this angry man that I share a home with, the storm blows over, the rage ship sets sail, and a more sorrowful cloud begins to pass over. He is sorry. The moment, for him, has changed. He has let go of what he needed to release and now regret can move in to fill the space.

And there I am, in what has become a familiar dilemma. If I were to say, OK, glad you feel better, now can we talk about what your outburst felt like from the passenger seat?, I run the risk of Act II. Remember, this is not a man who wants to acknowledge his anger—my using the word “anger,” in fact, can be enough to start another outburst, or at the least days of the silent treatment.

If I say nothing, which I have started to do—if I wait the few hours, then accept his apology, listen to his explanation of what made the experience so bad for him—then on the outside, the storm has passed.

Here’s the problem: The weather inside of me is still storming.

I’m angry, too. Expressing it in the moment would be masochistic. Expressing it at a later date turns out to be no less fraught.

So what’s a woman to do?

Better question: What is a woman who has lived her whole life dancing around the choreography of another person’s storms of rage—mother, boyfriends, ex-husband—what is that woman to do?

Last week I turned 47.

So here's what I've got.

I promise each of you what I’ve promised myself: My 48th birthday will not come, another year will not pass, with this question lying beside me as I fall asleep at night and greeting me as I wake up each morning.

Love is lovely, companionship is wonderful, the joy of building a life together is too complex to wrap up into one good word. But none of it, in fact not all of it bundled together and wrapped in a birthday ribbon, is worth the price of a peaceful life.

I don’t know what a woman is to do.

I only know what this woman can do.

I am beginning to imagine, and plan, and dream about, my bittersweet escape.

The warmth of memory and the savage passing of time

My mother lies in a hospital bed in North Central Florida, dying slowly and possessed with an intriguingly imaginative dementia.

Last night she told me that her kind neighbor, who discovered my mother on her kitchen floor four days ago and called EMS, has a sister who lives down the road with her husband and children. This family, my mother told me frankly but conspiratorially, is not nearly so kind. Instead, this family lives in a secret outer wing of the same ICU where my mother lies wasting--a secret glass wing that had been built specifically for this woman and her family. Way out in an adjacent grassy horse field they dwell, she and her family, in a glass-covered vestibule, eating their meals in the echoes and blips of the unsuspecting ICU unit down a long hidden hallway.


There are too many things to say right now for any one thing to seem relevant. I could tell you about my mother, circa 1970, in a bathing suit--cigarette in hand, the other hand on cocked hip, yelling some instruction to me and my sister from the shoreline where she stood. Our summer friends called her the Mayor of the Beach.

It wouldn't mean much, though, and it wouldn't be anything close to what I want to say.

So instead, right now, I try to picture my mother somewhere once like me, now: sitting cross-legged on a big messy morning bed, laptop on stacked pillows in her lap, birds singing in the courtyard behind her, sullen lover sitting at his own laptop through the door at the foot of the bed.

In other words, I try to imagine her in a life she never lived.

My mother has had many chances at her life, many stops and re-starts, and I suppose in this way I'm like her. I don't seem to live in small gestures either. I've often wondered who my mother would have become if she had been able to pull off second chances the way I have. I believe it's partly because of her that I actually have--her feisty, indeterminable spirit lives in me. Her anger taught me other things, too: that it is only safe to live with fangs ready to bare. This is turning out to be a hard bell to un-ring.

As for my mother, true to form, I believe her going-out is going to be one hell of a ride.

So here I sit, wondering now about who she might have been if luck had somehow intervened. I wonder who she would have been had she been allowed the space and the understanding her soul needed, right from the start. She didn't have a very good chance with what she was given. Neither did she ever figure out a way to stop fighting and make a chance open up.

I'm trying to honor my mother in what seem to be her last days, fighting for some scrap of her life because I believe that is what she would want. I know she would fight for me this way. There has never been any question in my heart that she would go to battle for me. Doing battle was often the most mothering she could do.

If I haven't completely forgiven her for this yet, I hope to, someday.

Starting Again, Again

There is irony in the date of my last post--May 19, 2011.

On May 18, 2011, just one day prior--though unbenowst to me at the time--my boyfriend had written an email to a woman he'd been having a years-long correspondence with. His May 18th email went like this:

That girl I'm seeing is so jealous of you! Somehow she knows I have a wicked crush on you--I wonder how. I miss you terribly.

I only just read this email last week. I read it as my boyfriend stood with movers some 20 miles away, amidst the boxes and bags of his soon-to-be-former apartment, and I sat awaiting the delivery of him in the still silence of my apartment. That's when I read this email.

But I've gotten ahead of myself. Let me tell you how we came together before I tell you how we started to split apart.

I met this man on December 22nd of last year, just three days before Christmas. By New Years Eve, we were speaking to each other every day. By Valentine's Day, we were seeing each other exclusively. He began talking about moving in together when his lease expired in January.

Meaning now. Thus the movers, the boxes and bags. But again, I'm getting ahead.

The spring came, and with it came changes. His work, normally busy, had become overwhelming. The loving, funny, gentle man I was falling in love with became almost a different person--like someone related to my boyfriend and bearing a striking resemblance, but of a completely different spirit and humor. Irritable most of the time. Short-tempered. Pessimistic, critical, sometimes mean and cutting behind a veil of humor. As his work intensified, so did the appearance of this look-alike interloper.

One morning in early May, perplexed but still smitten, I was eating breakfast before work and browsing through Facebook, a rare guilty pleasure--rare because I seem to have lost the time I once spent socializing online; guilty because as soon as I enter that realm, I seem to have lost a guaranteed minimum of ten minutes of my life.

I saw an update in my boyfriend's status--some witty remark, very Facebook-y. Following it was a short string of dialog between him and a woman I'll call Monique. Monique happens to be her name, but I don't think we'll meet her here. So let's call Monique Monique.

This dialog, this burst of banter, between my boyfriend and Monique made me uncomfortable. It was flirtatious, but more: It was intimate and comfortable in its flirtatiousness.

I knew of many names from my boyfriend's past--too many, in truth. Names of two former wives; names of girlfriends, lovers, dates. Monique was not one of them.

I called him when I realized that yes, there genuinely was a knot in my stomach.

Who is Monique, I asked when he picked up his phone, And why are you flirting with her on Facebook?

He laughed. He wasn't flirting, turned out. For god's sake, Monique was married!

AHA, I said. Which of your friends is Monique's husband?

I believe that you already know the answer.

He had never met Monique's husband.

I can say now that the months followed--I am not exaggerating here, this is embarassing enough without additional embellishment--months of rageful arguments, all centering around my boyfriend's conduct on Facebook--were the most hostile I have ever spent in a relationship. The fights were not only about Monique, but about most of the women of his Facebook friends to whom he wasn't related. My boyfriend had dated most of them--some many years prior, others within the past few years. And they all met up regularly on Facebook, exchanging double entendre, lascivious comments, emoticons extraordinaire.

That is the part I did know.

What I didn't know was that following that very first conversation I had with my boyfriend in May, the conversation about Monique and how my boyfriend was not flirting with her, he had sent Monique the email you saw above--the one that starts, "That girl I'm seeing is SO jealous of you!"

Back to what I did know. The topic of Facebook, and my boyfriend's conduct on it, was a ball of twine that, once I started tugging, seemingly had no end. A ball of adolescent twine. Adolescent, defensive, defiant twine.

I may not have KNOWN, but I knew. The man doth protested too much. Week after week, argument after argument, we seemed to be locked in a groundhog day of words -- my interpretation of his conduct in these online relationships; his self-righteous denial and disbelief that I could be so paranoid and so lacking in trust to think that he would flirt with other women.

As a couple, we pushed on.

The summer was hot and long and mostly unpleasant. My boyfriend worked 60- or 70- hour weeks, including weekends, and complained bitterly throughout. It seemed as if I spent those months waiting for him to finish--he was always about to hang up a conference call, about to get off the computer, about to really start the weekend. I can picture him giving me the "just two more minutes" sign as he peered over his laptop at me, working from home on yet another intended long-weekend Friday. On one of these occasions I left, drove to the next town, took a yoga class, and drove home. When I walked back in he looked up from his conference call, rolled his eyes, and gave me the "just one more minute" gesture. Almost two hours later, his two minutes still hadn't passed.

At some time around October, the conversation about our moving in together became more serious. It had to; his lease was expiring on January 1, and he was ready to move on.

The Facebook arguments mostly died down, too. In the end he'd deleted most of the women whose interactions I found offensive. It felt like some subtle shift had taken place while I was sleeping. He seemed closer to understanding that there are things we just don't do when we're involved in a committed relationship. Out of respect, or something like it.

We picked a date for him to move into my 1-bedroom apartment: December 26. The plan was that we would shoehorn ourselves into my apartment for the few months before my lease expired in April--or for as long as we could stand the cramped quarters. We agreed that if time proved the space just too small, we'd forget our schedule and start looking for a bigger apartment sooner.

The holidays came without my really noticing. Work was busy, life was busy, and I had closets to empty.

It's not that I wasn't excited about my boyfriend moving into my apartment. I was. I was nervous, too: This apartment had been the first place I had chosen to live after leaving my marriage, and I had chosen it because the first time I had seen it I'd known, I will find peace here. The brick walls and high ceilings and tree-lined street had felt like home as soon as I moved in.

And I had found peace here. I had recovered from my lost marriage; had a couple of meaningful relationships, and the requisite number of crazy, newly single relationships. I had lived through and recovered from a major surgery; lost my grandfather--for so many years my ballast in this unsteady world. After all that, I had found my soul still mostly joyful and excited to start the day. The place had worked some magic on me, though no doubt plain time had something to do with it.

Which brings me to the morning of December 26. There I sat, surrounded by boxes and bags, when I heard my boyfriend's iPad bing with a new message.

Do you know how you know you're going to regret knowing something, but you ask the question anyway? I have always been the asker of those questions.

I lifted the cover of his iPad and saw the beginning of a message from Monique--my old friend Monique from Facebook. I knew my boyfriend's password because he'd given it to me to watch a movie over the summer. [And let me offer some advice to you here, readers: Always play the luddite. Pretend to not have a mind that can remember passwords or understand how to delete a browsing history. Adapting a persona of technical ignorance can be an enormous advantage when you least expect it.]

I entered his password. And witnessed months of flirtatious, endearing emails between Monique and my boyfriend. The last one he had sent was in mid-October: "Miss our conversations. Miss you terribly, as always. Love,..."

This new email from Monique, the one I'd heard come in on the iPad, started, "It's been awhile and I haven't heard from you..."

I thought it would be a good idea for me to reply to Monique. Who, I should mention, is married with two children; pregnant with a third. I did. I like to think of what feelings might have flooded her as she read my message. Whatever my imaginings, I hope the reality was much, much worse.

I also thought it would be a good idea to copy the words from my boyfriend's email to Monique--the email from May, the one that started those months of argument; the one that started, "That girl I'm dating is SO jealous of you..." I copied those words into a text message, and sent them to my boyfriend as he directed the movers handling his furniture and other belongings. I wondered if he'd remember them.

He did.

Anyone who has ever lived through a scene like this knows the stages that follow. First, his outrage at my reading his email. Then the confession. Then the apologies.

These apologies are their own sort of rollercoaster of emotions. They're not the pure mea culpas one might expect. There's quite a bit of anger at having been outed woven in with the apology. This has surprised me. But lately everything is surprising me, so take this with a grain of salt.

There are more details, but the details seem to matter less every day.

Here is what I know.

I let him move into my apartment after all. The timing had all the makings of a tragicomedy.

Most of the time I believe what he says: That this romantic flirtation was a last vestige of his single-man status, and a vestige that he allowed to linger for too long. "If you could see inside my head," he keeps saying, "You would see how ridiculous and meaningless it was." They had never dated--never actually even held hands. They had met at the home of a mutual friend, years before. Monique lives on the other side of the country. They are perfect for each other, actually--perfect illusions, untarnished and untarnish-able.

I know that if he could see inside my head, he would see how much has been lost.

I've synched up all of the dates of his email exchange with Monique--the ones that he saved, just since this past May--with dates in our relationship. The last email he sent, in mid-October, he sent a day after I'd taken a picture of him at lunch at one of my favorite downtown cafes. I loved that picture--he looked so boyish in it, so carefree. After the summer we'd had, it had felt triumphant to see him looking back at me through a lens like this.

I don't like looking at this picture anymore.

I looked forward to my boyfriend moving in to my apartment with real excitement. This, I had told myself--and really believed--this was a good man. My marriage had split apart under the strain of truths half-told. But this man, I'd believed--this man was a different creature altogether.

This part is actually true.

Just not in the way I thought.

I don't know what happens now.

There are moments when I think, Just believe him; accept that he was an idiot, and move on.

There are moments when I think, Why?

Why?