Dysfunctional Resilience

 Last night I was reading in bed and I heard a crackling sound and then again a rustle and I thought it might be Sophie but I didn't feel like getting out of bed so I kept reading (Homeland Elegies) but that was it, the guilt was creeping in and then I heard coughing a tiny cough a choke, really, so I lay the book down and got out of bed and walked down the hall the short hall and into the darkness of the room where the lady lay the princess lay gurgling. I don't know how to write anymore and remember writing these tales before when I used commas and semi-colons and short muscular verbs. Now it's all run-ons and no punctuation and stream of thought because after nine months of being at home and teaching on Zoom and doing all the usual things with Sophie like marveling at her hair and feeling her grace and changing her diapers and managing her medication and arguing with her insurance company and paying Nice Neurologist to write me scrips and listen to my suggestions for what we should do next, well, there's no other way to get it all down. I flipped on the light and Sophie's lips were dark were they blue? was she breathing? had she had a seizure? where's the pulse-ox? Let's make a long story short (the requisite shall we?). Sophie is ok so no worries all is well thank god (where is god?) and I sat up with her all night, you see, because I knew in that moment that had I not gone into her room at that exact moment she might have died. It feels good to type that out here in the public space that is this old blog for you dear Reader some of you well over a decade. I just knew in my bones that this is how it will happen but that it did not happen not happen last night. I sat up all night and then I fell asleep and woke with a start at ten til nine and Sophie was still sleeping Sleeping Beauty right next to me her lips red red rosed. I had to teach at 9:30 on the Zoom and one of the Marias was coming at 9:00 so I got up from the bower where we lay and made coffee and opened the door to one of the Marias who would be taking over for me. Where was I? My friend Noa from days gone by calls this all of this dysfunctional resilience and I call it a tale, a happily ever after, thickets of thorns and brambles and words and thankfulness to be alive, even now with no punctuation.

Essential

On Friday morning, I set up a Zoom call with my friends Louise, Jessica and Sarah. That's them (or is it they?) up there in that photo, except for Sarah. She was probably somewhere near when the photo was taken, talking, probably, or making someone laugh. I can't remember where it was taken, but it must have been in 1985 or shortly after we graduated from college. I coordinated the Zoom call to accommodate three different time zones, the earliest being mine on the left coast and the latest being Sarah's somewhere in France. So we gathered in our little boxes and smiled at each other and laughed and caught one another up on our children, thirteen between the four of us, close to the age we were in that photo, most of whom are already out of college or in college or soon to be in college. Thirty-five years and thousands of miles make no difference. I feel connected in every cell to these women, and the pandemic and all its despair and loneliness melt away for the couple of hours we spent together. It's always with yearning that I leave these meetings and a sad reluctance to separate, the sad little button you click, LEAVE THIS MEETING.

What does it mean -- essential? Pandemic words.

Each morning, Chris sends a brief note of what she's grateful for, and I am at once irritated (the tyranny of gratitude) and buoyed. My sisters and I share strange humor back and forth back and forth our lifetime together. Leslie, Kari and I text one another almost daily with snippets of poetry.  The death of a mother and a father, the illness of a spouse, the ongoingness of caregiving are met with words of love or a well-placed fuck and hearts and check marks, these little messages and connections and it doesn't seem possible to be shored up but it is and we are. Tanya posts pictures of flowers and plants from her walks, sketches everyday objects on her kitchen island, talks on the phone  in her lilting voice and we are both reassured. Debra texts each evening: Feeling the evening covidy feeling, and I know exactly what she means. And the silence from others says everything, essentially.

These friendships are essential. Touch is essential and full body hugs are essential. 

I'm not faint of heart. 

Henry said tonight that maybe it wouldn't be so bad to die after all, but I didn't say that I'd thought it myself. I said some kind of mumbo jumbo about doing good, being kind and helping people out since we appeared to be doomed in these disunited States. I said something sarcastic. I am being taken advantage of, after all, by persons who've betrayed me. Insults and injuries. I cling to that, aware of the danger. A burning bush, not yet consumed.  We had read an article in The Atlantic earlier in the day that set the tone. It didn't tell us anything different than we already knew, but it was written so clearly and concisely.  Terrible America.

Anger veers into dullness eventually and reveals sorrow deep and wide where I guess we tread for a bit, tread water, our feet making walking motions and hands a downward circle. I can do it, maybe forever and maybe not. 

Mrs. Schachter

My twelfth grade students are reading Elie Wiesel's Night, his memoir of the time he spent in a Nazi concentration camp and the struggle he had with his intense faith. No matter how many times I've encountered anything pertaining to the Holocaust, I am struck, slayed, overcome, and this short testament is no different. There's a harrowing scene early in the book, immediately following the evacuation of the ghetto in which Wiesel and his family have been living, when he and the others are being transported in a cattle car to the camps. Of course, they have no idea what's going on nor what is to come, but one woman -- Mrs. Schachter -- persists in screaming and crying about some sort of fire!, fire!, fire!, even as her small boy clings to her and begs her to stop. My students and I had a discussion about this part of the memoir and Wiesel's recollections -- was Mrs. Schacter hallucinating under her extreme distress? Was this a prophecy? Was this a divine warning? Why did Wiesel include this part in the memoir? As they grappled with the questions, I told them that there was no right or wrong answer. I just listened and offered my own paltry thoughts.




Last night I had a sort of breakdown prompted by a few external situations regarding Sophie's childcare, her upcoming IVIG treatments that were delayed by insurance issues, her doctor's negligence in ever following up and calling me back, one of my son's demands, and my ex-husband's -- well -- I won't go into that. My collapse and crying was also, obviously, prompted by mostly internal situations regarding -- well -- everything. Mothering. Disability. Inadequacy. Resentment. Exhaustion. Despair. I feel acutely during these times that I just can't go on.






I texted early this morning with a dear friend across the country. We spoke of our attachment to our children and to the significant men in our lives -- how the boundaries are mutable, how we are hard put to figure out just when and where and how we "set the patterns when we became mothers," and how difficult it is to "escape" them, how our definitions of ourselves are seemingly dependent on those given to us by our children and men. "And it's not their fault!" my friend said.



It's all impossible, I think when I am most under duress, and that helps.




I just finished reading Sophia Shalmiyev's memoir Mother Winter. It's a remarkable book about a motherless daughter told in fragments. I will be thinking about it for a long time. I've read several interviews with the author and even engaged with her on Facebook. In the interviews, she talks about the roles women and men take on when they parent, particularly in regard to what I've read elsewhere as emotional labor. I hesitate to write here about my own resentments because I know their source is partly of my own making. I spoke about identity this past weekend as a mentor at a seminar for women who are mothers of adult children with disabilities. I also listened to several women talk about marriage, how their own long marriages had succeeded. I was struck by how each of these women -- how all of these women -- were doing the work, the emotional labor, even as they extolled their husband's "kindnesses" and "generosity" and so forth. I'm not sure I can get there -- here -- on this blog, today, really grapple with these themes and thoughts. But I know they are at the root of my despair.

Cosmic

My best friend is keeping vigil as her mother lies dying from a terrible cancer. "Why is life so difficult?" I ask Sophie as I heave her into the car. I might have said hard. Sometimes I feel like a monster. Sometimes I am a monster. Heavy. This morning I slept with and woke to the stars. That's what it feels like. The space he brings me. "Are you flying?" he asks, and I say, "No, it's not like that." I want to say soar. The word weightless. 

Winter in Southern California and The Guadalupe Valley, Baja

Don't be jealous.

Gray whale breach

My little sister Melissa and I

Old dear friends -- Brumi Winery in Baja

The view from my shower

The Wall (the thing that fucker in the White House wants built higher and wider)

"A good practical sort of immortality"

Just a couple of hours outside of Los Angeles, you pass through the most incredible landscape of farms and hills and endless road. It's where most of your produce is grown, folks, and last I heard, a lot of California farmland is filled with rotting produce because of that goon in office and his henchmen, busy Making America Great. They've cracked down on brown immigrants who work the fields, and the Real Americans are not stepping up to do the work. You can read about that here.

That isn't fake news either. But this isn't a post about the Pussy Grabber in Chief or his racist Attorney General Keebler Elf, so let's move on.

We stopped in the town of Earlimart to get gas and victuals.

The gas station had the best moniker I've ever seen yet was in direct sight of the Earlimart Market for World Peace.

Doesn't she make you want to pile the Bud into the trunk of your car and drive backward to when America was truly great?

Bless her heart.

Cast my memory back there Lord, sometimes I'm overcome --

Despite the Goon in Chief and his Band of Billionaires, you can pass through a lot of California now and see only a few "white" faces. This evidently terrifies a lot of people.

I find it thrilling that boundaries are blurry.

You can drive approximately five hours from Los Angeles, the sprawling home to over 8 million humans of every color, creed and culture and reach the south entrance of Yosemite National Park. My friend Cara, her two girls and my two boys have been numerous times together, and this year we stayed in a little cabin in the woods inside the park in an area called Wawona. We largely avoid the crowds in the valley and stay up and around the secret places near the park entrance.

We don't do much of anything, really, but wander around and look up and down, float on the river and lay on our backs on sun-warmed rocks. We laugh a lot, mostly at Oliver who can imitate anything and anyone. We all have riotous senses of humor. The girls balance the boys, while Cara and I eschew exercise and adopt the life patterns of marmots for the most part. Oliver did not let us forget our general "cringiness." If you need a translation, let me know.

We do this kind of thing:

and a little of this kind of thing:

and some of this kind of thing:

We even had a roadside "adventure" this year. Cara's car had an electrical short, we think, so we were mysteriously locked out of her car in the middle of Nowhere just after finishing up a roadside picnic. Our purses and phones were locked inside the car, and the teenagers, despite their phone appendages, were not connected to the world wide webs or the vast cell satellites arcing overhead, so we basically did one of those survival kind of things and put our privileged heads together to try to figure out WHAT TO DO.

I can tell you that everyone has an idea or opinion on how to break into a car.

You know what? We city slickers now marvel at just how hard it is to break into a car. Given how many of ours have been broken into in the big shitty, who knew that the windows are virtually indestructible, the locks un-pickable, the whole American metal machine invulnerable?

A few tourists did try to help, offering hangers and various tools. I have actually quite successfully broken into several of my cars, during days of yore, but my tried and true techniques just didn't hack it. I'm a woman of twentieth century crime, I guess. Other tourists just stared at us and took videos. Stupide americaines.  Our favorite samaritans were two women with blue hair and heavy Eastern Europeanish/Russian accents (think female versions, just barely, of what you might imagine our goon-in-chief's best Russian buddy sounds like)who walked over with crow bars from their rental and said, in what became a sort of anthem that Oliver repeated, over and over for the rest of the trip: Let me help you break open car.

Henry, who had otherwise made the women, men and children of Yosemite swoon everywhere we went, had no luck with a rock and muscle, and neither did the rest of us. I thought, in my optimistic way, that a solution would come to us, eventually, that we wouldn't perish with so much cheese and crackers and cans of limonata in the cooler and surely two marmots and a passel of teenagers wouldn't be attacked by any animal or human should it get dark.

Eventually, though, a couple of rangers pulled up on the scene, hammered a few wedges in the doors and saved us. To be fair, it did take them at least twenty minutes, and they were armed. We secretly hoped they'd shoot the car open, but that didn't happen.

We also did some more of this:

Oh yeah, and this:

I know. I know. It's almost ridiculous, except it's not. It is respite and wildness, air and water and earth and fire. I honestly think Yosemite is one, if not the holiest places on the planet, and my gratitude both for its proximity and my privilege to visit it, over and over, is boundless.

Another glorious Sierra day in which one seems to be dissolved and absorbed and sent pulsing onward we know not where. Life seems neither long nor short, and we take no more heed to save time or make haste than do the trees and stars. This is true freedom, a good practical sort of immortality. 

John Muir,  My First Summer in the Sierra, 1911