list four: a sequence of events

1. Last spring, Myron took off for almost three weeks in Ukraine visiting his dad’s relatives. 
2. When he got back home, he bounced back and forth between Winnipeg and Ottawa a couple of times, and then he moved back home for good in June to start his new job while I worked on getting the house ready to sell.
3. He missed our anniversary.
4. He missed my reading at Blog Out Loud.
5. He missed the terrible roofer, the terrible handyman, the day I came home from Montreal to find the front porch sloppily remade without my consent, and a dozen other home improvements.
6. He came back for a visit, and we watched the Mars landing on the night I heard that my cousin, a young man named after my father, had been murdered. I felt so small and so unready for him to leave again.
7. I listed the house.
8. I went to BlissdomCanada and made some wonderful friends.
9. The house sold. We packed and cleaned every single inch, and trudged away from it in horrifyingly freezing windy temperatures dragging suitcases along the highway the night before closing.
10. I spent a couple of weeks in Toronto in January. 
11. I took the train to Winnipeg and got here in February. All told, we were apart for almost seven months and it was as awful as you think.
12. I failed at: keeping the blog going, The Month of Letters, general grownuppityness including timely email responses.
13. I passed on a pass/fail scale at: Scintilla, being a decent friend, unpacking.
14. I rocked at: wall painting, coconut curry chicken, getting Myron out of the house for fun things.
15. I started to write again.
16. I ate a shawarma that put every single Ottawa shawarma I ever had to shame, and I do not exaggerate about shawarma.
17. I waited at my father-in-law’s side in a hospital and realized that I was part of this family in a way I’d never realized it before.
18. Today, June 18, around fourteen months since he sent it, a postcard from Myron’s Ukraine trip showed up here, forwarded from our Ottawa address. On the back it says We’ll have a little while together, and by the time this arrives I’ll probably be away again. Never was I ever so glad for him to be wrong.

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For a while now I’ve been wanting to do a year’s worth of lists a la hula seventy. And I am so behind! I’ll never do them all but I am going to do as many as I can, god damn it.

I never was smart with love.

We are another year married. There are long times when the work of marriage is exhilarating, rewarding, we-are-so-damn-good-at-this work and you remember why you said you wanted to do it every day until you died. And then there are times when your marriage will sit there and drone like a Coke machine and every once in a while you’ll give it some money and it will give you cavities and caffeine one mouthful at a time. Because it is not going away; no distributor is coming by in a fixed number of years giving you the new model Coke machine with the dollar acceptor that never spits back your wrinkly-ass dollar. Marriage is maintenance and archeology and psychology and industrial arts and home ec. It is that kind of math that Good Will Hunting did. It is all the work, and it is work on yourself and I both love and loathe work on myself. You can’t work on the other person, though. That’s their project, the same way you don’t want them messing around in your project even when they’re looking askance at you like are you going to get that done anytime this year or what? It is hard to do your project, let alone the other stuff that goes with being married, when you are broken down into your component parts and cannot reassemble yourself because there is no allen wrench for this.

 

It took more than I can tell you to get me to this point, right here, today, with the wherewithal to write a post that was more than a dive into my past for safe stories. It took brutal sickness, complete mental check-out, anger and more anger and so many I-give-up shrugs that I don’t even have shoulder ligaments anymore. It took every single sunny Winnipeg winter day and then it took the snow melting and purple puffball alliums coming up from the earth. It took a lot of bacon. It took me wondering what I could abandon, and who. My mind did a fucking Ironman this spring, and then it did a victory tour to Ottawa where I once again attended the inspiring Social Capital Conference (and even hosted my own roundtable discussion about group web projects) and had meals and drinks and gelatos and good talk with some of my favorite people in this entire country. It really is something to give your sanity an IV bag full of validation and camaraderie, and I don’t take it for granted.

I’m home again now, writing again at last and making small progress on the house. The bedrooms and all of the hallways in this house are a bizarre flashback to the you-wish-it-was-caramel-but-really-it’s-Cover-Girl-foundation brown walls I had in the master bedroom in my old house. To make it worse, the bedrooms here are small—1910s small—so those dingy brown walls made the rooms look even smaller. I painted the open closet of the master bedroom last month in a soft blue, but it took until now to get the bedroom walls started themselves. When I painted those words on my walls last time, tiny traces of them still showed up on the surface after multiple coats of primer and paint. I liked knowing they were there. This time I wondered what kind of love I wanted to seal into the bedroom, secret except for you, me, and the rest of the internet. 

And here’s where I get back into the beloved and beloathed work on myself. People who have been privy to the deeper hell of the past year heard me say more than once that I’ve been an open wound for almost all of it, and I’m just sick of living that way. I’m not saying I’ll never fall apart again, but I can try harder instead of being seduced by how deliciously easy it is. There is only one thing that’s going to kill me, whether it’s a tumor or a truck. Whatever it is, it’s not here today. What is the worst a person could do? Die on me? I’ve survived that. Shut me out? I’ve survived that too. Break my heart? Been there, baby. Tell my secrets? It’s been done. None of it killed me, no matter how I thought it would; I am still here, rode hard though my psyche might be. The people I love deserve all of me. They earned it for loving what was indestructible beneath that open wound. 

#scintilla13: charmed, I'm sure

I’m a cofounder of The Scintilla Project, along with my friends Onyi and Dominique, two whip-smart and artfully snarky women with beautiful hair. This is my response to one of the Day 15 prompts, Tell the story of how you got the thing you are going to keep forever. Include an image in your post, if you can. We believe that your stories make you who you are and we’re asking you to share yours. Interested? Sign up at scintillaproject.com and follow us at @ScintillaHQ.

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My favorite charm: the one commemorating her engagement to my dad. When I told my mom I was getting married, I hadn’t seen her for a few years, though we spoke on the phone frequently. “It’s no big deal,” I said. “Just a tiny wedding, just a couple of people. You don’t have to come if you don’t want.” It broke my heart to say that, but from her sigh of relief I knew I’d said the right thing.

“I wish I could. But I’m happy for you.”

My grandparents had both had serious recent health issues. I wanted her with me, of course, but they needed her. I didn’t know at the time that she was already quite sick herself and felt unable to leave home even for a weekend. I asked if I could borrow her charm bracelet to wear for the day, and made arrangements for Michelle to pick it up on her way to the occasion.

I had always loved it, ever since I was a little girl and first jingled it under her watchful eye. It was made up of around 25 charms, mostly from her teens and early twenties. I have always had a fascination for who my mother was outside of her role as a parent, and the bracelet dangled and jangled with the noise of her history. Her first job out of high school, as a secretary in an office down in the city. Her sixteenth and seventeenth birthdays. Road trips with friends to Virginia, Gettysburg, Philadelphia, New York. Her graduation, her nomination as Girl of the Month, January 1969. Her engagement and wedding. Obscure charms with dates engraved and no clue as to what they might mean—their significance secret. And now I was going to have a part of her to keep with me on the day I would make the most serious promises ever. It mattered. I walked into the art gallery where Myron was waiting for me, and when he noticed it on my wrist, he immediately tuned out the celebrant and brushed it with his fingertips. I still don’t know if he knew everything he agreed to when he said “I do.”

When she said afterward that I could keep the bracelet, I was moved and grateful. I kept it safe and examined the charms again from time to time, especially when I missed her. I brought it with me when she went into the hospital for the last time, and I wore it through all the grief rituals in the days after she died. The cousin who gave her this bridesmaid charm came to the funeral home, and I showed it to her—Remember this? She kept it. It was a moment I won’t forget. Thirty-five years vanished for her and then rushed back again. All because of a piece of metal the size of a quarter. 

They say after someone dies, all you have left are your memories, and to an extent that’s true. And obviously, you do get to keep personal effects and grant them meaning. I love that part of what remains of my mother are these mysteries, the question of whether my scamp of a father proposed on April Fool’s Day on purpose, how it felt on July 1 when she started her job at H.K. Porter, who she was with when she visited the San Jacinto Monument. These are conversations I put off, thinking I had time. Now some holes in her history, even just a few of them, have shape. I know what I’m missing.

#scintilla13: can't take her nowhere

I’m a cofounder of The Scintilla Project, along with my friends Onyi and Dominique, two whip-smart and artfully snarky women with beautiful hair. This is my response to one of the Day 14 prompts, Talk about the time when you were younger and you embarrassed your parents in public, the one that still shames you. We believe that your stories make you who you are and we’re asking you to share yours. Interested? Sign up at scintillaproject.com and follow us at @ScintillaHQ.

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I wish my mother were still around because I would call her up and ask her for an answer for this prompt, because the truth is I’m not ashamed of any of the times I would have embarrassed her. This is not going to be a great prompt response, and no great truths are going to be unearthed within. That said:

I know we were shopping for back-to-school clothes. It was 1987, and we were in the shoe section of Horne’s, which was a department store in the mall—one of many that I think Macy’s bought out. I remember the shoes I wound up getting that day, two pairs of them: one pair of peach Chucks and another pair of Reebok high tops, the kind that didn’t have the dumb velcro strap at the top. The leather was a soft, grayish blue suede, and it matched a Georgetown sweatshirt that I loved to pieces that year. The soles and shoelaces were a contrasting gray, and there was not a bit of white to be seen on them. I don’t think anyone else had that exact variety and I so wish I could find a pic for you on Google. I fucking loved those shoes.

It was near enough to the end of the day that my mom had been carrying those huge bags full of clothes, the kind they keep at the clothes counter but are really made to hold comforters. It was the point of the shopping day when I’d start to feel guilty about how much she’d spent, especially when I usually got only one pair of sneakers a year and the Chucks were not exactly durable. (But peach, you guys, peach.) But those Reeboks were dream shoes, and I could picture them peeking out below just-slouched-enough denim in just the right stonewash. 

The saleswoman packed up the stray pieces of tissue paper and I put on my old shoes. I knew what was coming: another large total on the receipt, the way she would pull each twenty out of a white Equibank envelope one at a time to pay. More guilt! And then like the gods were saying it would all be okay, “Linus and Lucy” started playing over the Horne’s loudspeaker. And I danced.

She was probably embarrassed, but she laughed, and she didn’t tell me to stop. And years later, she would remind me of that day and laugh again every time she did. It’s still almost impossible for me to resist dancing to that silly, happy tune, and I’m warning you now that if you take me out in public it could happen at any time.

#scintilla13: Noah

I’m a cofounder of The Scintilla Project, along with my friends Onyi and Dominique, two whip-smart and artfully snarky women with beautiful hair. This is my response to one of the Day 10 prompts, Write about spending time with a baby or child under the age of two. The challenge: if you’re a parent, do not talk about your own child. We believe that your stories make you who you are and we’re asking you to share yours. Interested? Sign up at scintillaproject.com and follow us at @ScintillaHQ.

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This time my story is the candy center inside the shell of someone else’s story. Bear with me.

I truly suck at making new friends. (You guys, we are going to have to brainstorm on the issue of me and new-in-town friendmaking as soon as Scintilla is done.) People kind of need to hammer at me for a while until I let them in, and most people do not want to make that kind of effort, which I completely understand. That is a lot of work to put in with someone when you don’t even know if they’re worth it. (No, not all friends are.) But I have boundless gratitude for people who put in the effort, whether we’re friends or good friends or would-be sisters who have never had to go through that room-sharing closet-stealing diary-reading bullshit.

Beth put in the effort. She was the head of the English department at the private school where I taught after I left the reservation. She was from Back East too, and by a few weeks into the school year we were heading out for dinners and talking talking talking. It was a kind of friendship I had missed so much and for so long. I still remember the day she came into my empty classroom during lunch, closed the door behind her, and said, “Well. I’m pregnant.”

Beth was in a relationship, but the father of the baby was going through some stuff. He made efforts to be there for her, but she needed someone more reliable at the time. I was already pretty sure that I didn’t want to be a parent, but people love to tell you that will change when you get older. Beth’s pregnancy was the only one I’ve ever observed at this proximity as an adult, and so part of me wondered if it would stoke a baby-fire within me. If it did, how would I tell Myron, who was also uninterested in parenting? But Beth needed me, and there was no way I would say no to her when she asked me to be her birth coach.

It is a strange thing to go through this process when you are not the parent. I think I was the only one in our class who wasn’t a sperm-donating partner to the pregnant lady in question. While Beth grappled with grading research papers for her students, extracurricular obligations, and writing recommendations for her graduating seniors, she also weighed the chances that she might end up raising her child as a single parent. The one thing that never wavered was her commitment to what would be best for the baby, even while so many other things were in flux. I had admired Beth throughout the school year for many other reasons, but her dedication to motherhood surpassed everything else. I was in awe of her.

When the time came, Beth had a c-section and I never ended up using my coaching skills to remind her to breathe. Noah was a gorgeous baby, and Beth was radiant. I’d thought she was devoted to him before he was born, but it was nothing compared to what it was like after she met him, saw his face, let him grasp her finger. I heard the echoes of every person who’d ever told me that I would change my mind about wanting a child of my own, from people much wiser than I ever was. 

The birth took place just before the end of the school year. Soon Beth would be taking Noah back to her home state, where she had family to help support her. One day I went to her house to visit, and she asked me to watch him for a few minutes so that she could get some time to herself. This was not my first baby experience—I had held Noah before, and other babies too, for that matter. But this was the first time as an adult that I had been all alone with someone else’s child for more than a few minutes. His beauty was undeniable—he was a perfect blend of his parents, serene and unbothered, his eyes slowly blinking and his mouth opening for a yawn. I looked into his eyes, allowed him to investigate me, held him and put him in his bouncy seat and held him again. I searched myself for baby fever symptoms and found none. 

I was proud of my friend. I was overjoyed that her son was in the world, hopeful for him and confident that he could have had no better mother than Beth. And that was all.

I know. I know. It is surely different when it’s your own. And it’s not the kind of decision you make at once, just because you hold one particular baby at one particular time in your life. But it was probably one of the first times I felt deeply at peace with the idea of remaining childfree, a desire I felt for the first time sometime around age eight. Before then, I wondered if the line about changing my mind might actually come true. Instead, I felt the rightness of skipping this particular adventure, the way I will skip skydiving and traveling to Australia and fugu and NASCAR and so many books whose back-cover blurbs intrigue me. I am not the kind of person who needs to experience it all. Few people really are, no matter what their life lists may say. Being okay with what your heart and mind need is sometimes a process of many years and lessons, especially when it’s different from the accepted norm. But occasionally it is as loud and clear as a church bell, and you can feel it vibrate within you. For me it radiated outward from Noah’s tiny swaddled body in my arms.