In the interest of keeping up with what would seem to be an abundance of posts on my part over the past few days, and in an effort to avoid another withering look from the secretary, who apparently thinks my recent late arrival to and early departure from work are unacceptable, I am forcing myself to sit at this desk a little longer and write, even though I am not really married to any particular idea or line of thought at the moment.
I could talk about that secretary, who has been snippy and short today, I think because she believes I am trying to get away with working less and being a slacker, even though our new boss, The Dean, has given me complete license to set my own schedule and work when and where I wish to work. This declaration from The Dean has made me very Zen about my job, which is quite a change from the batshit crazy swirling pit of despair I was swimming in a few months ago, and so I don’t really feel the need to set the secretary straight. She is not the boss of me, after all, and although it probably makes me a bad feminist to admit this, I am sure if she were a guy she would not be all pissy about my glorious new hours. Sorry ladies, but we can be real bitches to each other, yes?
I could elaborate on the work situation and attempt to piece together the sequence of events from last spring that filled me with such despair that I could hardly function. I could discuss how I actually miss teaching, and how this strange truth, coupled with the aforementioned despair, actually made me want to flee this job and go back to the high school classroom. And then I could go on to recount the state and local budget crises that are cutting teaching jobs left and right, and how, thank God, The Dean came on board in June and in one week completely changed the culture and energy of this office and made me feel like I could stay here and try this for at least another semester.
I could talk about what I would rather be doing right now–going to T@rget to buy muffin pans, because when I moved someone insisted I throw my old ones away because they were pretty gross looking, and I have not replaced them yet but must do so immediately because I have committed to make a dessert for an event on Saturday, and cupcakes are involved.
I could talk about how discouraging it is to look at my blog stats and see that my daily average is three, except for June 29, a day that saw 138 hits even thought I didn’t even post anything on June 29. I know it is not a given that my sudden return to writing will guarantee a sudden flood of commenting readers, or even silent ones, and I have to remind myself that writing is really about me, the writer, and not you, the reader, except that it is a little lot about you, too, and I get a pretty big charge out of double and triple digit stats.
I could tell you how I almost closed my browser and walked away from this lame post, and about how I looked at the clock telling me it’s almost 5:00 and thought, “Oh, what the hell,” and decided to publish anyway, and how it is a testament to my humble attempt to find my muse that I got this far in the first place.
1 standard pillow
2 small pillows
1 pink stuffed pig (Piggie, the Chosen One)
1 pink stuffed pig travel neck pillow
3 dragons (red, gold, green)
1 large child-size Elmo wearing Elmo underwear
1 heart-covered dog
1 stuffed Horton, sans the Whos
1 pink rubber duckie
1 Jamba Juice kids’ sports bottle (filled with water)
1 MOBY Tyke Light (AKA The Light Man)
1 handmade crib quilt
1 twin comforter
Every few days I remove one or two things that I think might go unnoticed (NEVER Piggie, Beastie, the Light Man, or the Jamba Juice bottle) and return them to the playroom, and for a few days the bed will be spacious and cozy, and then one night I am tucking her in and there they all area again, having been returned to their nest with great stealth and without a word to me from their rescuer, and I just shake my head and bid my small Fred Sanford child goodnight.
Did you ever have one of those days when you go back to sleep after the 30-minute programmed snooze, and so you are already running late when the toilet stops up for no reason, and then that horrible thief-breaking-into-the-house sound thunders through the baby monitor speaker and causes you to jump and hit your elbow on the hard tiled corner wall in the bathroom, but it turns out to be the cat attacking an Easy Ups box in the hallway, and just as your heart rate returns to normal the Frog Pod bath toy organizer loses suction and crashes to the floor of the tub and nearly causes you to put out your own eye with a mascara wand, and then, while you are trying to put the dog’s harness on her so you can take her to your friend’s house for a doggie play date, your newly pedicured and sandaled feet get covered with mulch and dirt, and then after you finally get the dog into the car you accidentally slam her freakishly long tail in the passenger door, and when you open it to free her she shoots out of the open driver’s side door like a bullet fired from a gun and runs around the neighborhood at breakneck speed with her retractable leash dragging behind her, and so when you are finally in the car and en route to work you are drenched with sweat, and your hair is all wild in your face, making you look slightly crazy, and you are sure it’s going to be the Worst Day Ever, and then you look into the rearview mirror at your daughter in her Jackie O. sunglasses, and she sees you looking at her and she smiles and says, “Turn on the music, Mommy, I feel like singing a song,” and you know you were wrong, and it’s going to best day of your life. Did you ever have one of those days?
I borrowed a Flip camera from the EDU library at work,and now I must have one. For your enjoyment: Mia’s rendition of the ABC song always cracks me up, but my favorite from her repertoire, which is at the end of this clip, is Rob Thomas’s “Little Wonders” (which Mia calls “Bease Small Howers”). It is her favorite song, and she sings it ALL. THE. TIME.
I’ve been thinking a lot about this unfinished draft since I wrote about it on Sunday, and there’s no doubt in my mind that although a lot of other things occupy my time, this draft has been an overwhelming mental and emotional roadblock for me, and I really need to put it behind me. I’m not so naive that I think clicking “publish” will take away the weight in my heart that this piece represents, but it’s time for me to let this one go.
~~~
You were there again last night, standing off to the side in that dream I had about–what? I don’t even remember what it was about, just random bits of place and sound, and you. Always you. You have been in my dreams almost nightly since that Saturday in August, the Saturday before you took your leave, the Saturday I had THAT dream. That’s the dream I can’t forget. I’m willing to bet I never will.
I’m sure you’ve heard the stories. You know the ones where people swear their mother or grandfather or lifelong best friend was sitting at the kitchen table or standing in the dimly lit corner of the bedroom hours or days or weeks after they breathed their last. The survivors speak with sincere conviction, and they will talk of how serene they felt after the encounter, how they found peace and closure and the strength they needed to heal. Don’t mistake my tone for skepticism; I believe those people. I just hope I’m never one of them. I have always been very clear with my loved ones on this issue: I don’t want you to come back for a visit, because you would scare me right into the grave with you. Just musing about it right now makes the back of my neck prickle. I’ll miss you terribly, I have explained, but please don’t haunt me.
In all the dreams sinced that first one you have been a quiet figure at the table, a part of some nondescript crowd, a silent passenger in my car. Is there something you are trying to tell me? Because I’m not getting it. This standing around watching thing you’re doing–it’s lost on me. Say something already. It’s like that time we were having dinner at some Italian restaurant after Derek’s college graduation, and we were sitting at different tables, but every time I looked up you were burning a hole into my glass of Chardonnay, shaking your head in silent disapproval but saying nary a word. Of course, the silent treatment only lasted until we were in the car, and then I got the alcohol lecture. You never were one to hold your tongue. So spit it out. I’m listening.
The week before my grandmother died–wait, let’s cut the formality. We called her MaMa. The week before MaMa died my mom and sisters and I sat in the room where she slept and reexamined the pictures and keepsakes we’d been looking at our entire lives. We tucked some things away in our pockets, trying, I’m sure, to maintain some connection to this person who was so suddenly so vacant and absent. It’s what we do when someone is dying or has recently died: we handle their belongings, breathe in their fleeting scent, make every feeble attempt to wrap them around us even as they are departing. It’s been three months since we huddled over those photo albums and glass jars, and those few things we slipped into our pockets that week are the only things we’ve got left of MaMa, save what’s in our hearts and minds. For the last eight years she was married to someone who now has decided he’ll let us know when we can carry out that final ritual. At first it was all I could think about–what he was keeping from me, what he was denying my family. And then I started seeing her–in my dreams.
I guess you know there were a lot of things that went unsaid between us. I have been mad at you for a long time–eight years, to be exact. You left me when you married him, physically, but also in some other way I can’t explain very well. A part of you went away for good eight years ago, and I have missed that part of you terribly. It’s a tricky combination, this mixture of immense love and hurt and anger, more so now that I don’t see any chance of resolution. There’s the rub, see. I have always believed there would come a time when we would clear the bad air and set things right, but now, well, you see the problem. I came to square things away with you that last Sunday afternoon, to say my piece, to make sure you knew how much I loved you, how good my life had been because of you. But you were mostly already gone by then, and I have been dragging around these heavy chains of regret and sadness and, yes, the anger, it’s still there, ever since. If I knew how to break free I would, but for some reason I am convinced you are holding the key, and I don’t know how to get it from you.
She drove me crazy a lot of the time. She knew everything, everything, I tell you, and she repeated everything she knew. A lot. She was only 73, so I’m pretty sure she was just that way by nature and NOT because of her age. I can remember her arguing with my PaPa when I was little, and he knew everything, too, so for an introverted kid like me it was always best to find a seat out of the line of fire and keep an eye on the door, just in case I needed a quick escape.
And I’m not entirely sure, but I think you are almost certainly frowning at me. Is that for real, or am I just projecting my own disappointment in myself on your dream face? That’s the trouble with dreams, isn’t it? They can’t ever really be trusted, and yet, there they are, night after night.
I don’t remember everything I dream, but when I do, MaMa is part of what I remember. She is silent, but her presence is unmistakable. Actually, I sort of see her everywhere, but not in the creepy afterlife sense. Last week I was dusting the antique lantern she gave me last winter, the one my mom had given her for Christmas 40 years ago, and I discovered a post-it on the back with a message in her familiar scrawl: Hand-Me-Down Lantern. There is a large manila envelope in my hall closet filled with pictures and notes she wrote to me about her childhood; she sent it to me a few years ago, and every time I get something off the shelf where it rests it falls in the floor at my feet. Other reminders are not so obvious. There are the Tazo teabags on the shelf over the sink, which my aunt gave me for Christmas at MaMa’s house, and they remind me of the truly awful cup of tea she fixed me on Christmas Eve to help me stop coughing. There’s the dust ruffle on Mia’s crib, which my mother made while MaMa and I tag-team vacuumed my floor and sorted tiny baby clothes and listened to June Carter Cash’s last recording on my laptop. There’s the light fixture on the screened porch she helped me install, and the antique scotch bottle she went for every time she came here–she wanted to see how much it was worth and spent hours at my computer, no doubt trying to hook me up with Antiques Road Show. Sometimes when I’m missing her hard, so that the mere act of breathing in and out causes tears to rush into my eyes, I cannot look around my house without thinking of her: she sat right there, she left her purse in that chair (twice) and had to come all the way back for it, she once left this door open and my cat got out, she almost set that tree on fire trying to smoke out some insect’s nest, I was going to send her those pictures of Mia and never did, she rocked my baby on that end of the sofa, and here, on this end of the sofa, she once tried to comfort me because I was emotional over some dumb movie. And I turned away from her. Can you here my chains rattling?
That night–the night before you left us–I dreamed we were at the community center where our family reunions were held every year, and it was sort of like a reunion, except for the part where your casket was on that long table at the front of the room instead of the old family pictures and keepsakes. It was the end of your funeral, and we were leaving you there, walking toward the kitchen at the back of the room. The doors were wide open and light was pouring into the dim gray light of the cinder block room, and then the side door went dark and someone walked in. It was PaPa–before his kidneys failed, before he got that stagger in his step, before me, even. I recognized him from those pictures you kept in the bottom dresser drawer, all strong and thin and handsome, and he walked right past us, walked right up to the front of the room to where you were lying. Except you were standing by the table now, no casket beside you, no vacant look on your face, no death in your eyes. Your hair was longer, and dark like it used to be before you had to ”wash that gray right out,” and you were wearing a white dress I’d seen in a picture once. You reached out your arms to him, and he lifted you up and carried you out into the sunlight, and you were both gone before we all got outside. I woke the next morning feeling dazed and ethereal. That afternoon you were gone for real.
I’ve started this last paragraph seven or eight times. When I started writing I wasn’t sure where I’d end up. Turns out I’m still not sure. Maybe I thought the reflection would lend me some clarity, melt away some of these awful feelings, free me from the chains. Maybe it will over time, but for now I have to keep reminding myself: I have been missing her for three months and eight years, and now I’ll be missing her forever. This isn’t how it was supposed to be.
~~~
I originarlly started writing this piece in December of 2007, three months after my grandmother died and about two weeks before her second husband decided to allow us into their house to claim some of her belongings. A lot has changed since then. He is now on wife number 3, whom he married the April after my grandma died. Mia and I have moved into a new house. The hall closet and the couch and the tree and the screened porch and the chair and the teabags over the sink that I mention in this post as memory triggers are now memories themselves. In my attic are two plastic bins full of my grandma’s stuff, and I am gradually finding myself able to pull some of it out and examine it, ocassionally placing something on a shelf or on a wall in my new home. I don’t have those dreams every single night anymore, only every once in a while, but about once a month I dream that she has died all over again, and the events are so real that I wake up feeling like I did in those weeks just after she died, the grief so fresh and painful that I can hardly remember the motions required to get through the day.
A few things have not changed, however. I still remember every single detail of that prophetic dream, right down to where I was standing and who was standing next to me, and what we were wearing, and the way the light from the open door cast a fuzzy glow on my grandparents as they left us. I still run into reminders of MaMa on a daily basis, and sometimes I am able to smile about them, but most of the time they catch me so off guard that I am stunned into silence for hours. And if you listen closely, you can still hear my chains rattling, and I don’t know that I’ll ever find the key.
After offering Mia a bite of cheese omelette, which she politely removed from her mouth after a few chews:
Me: Oh honey, you like eggs. [aside] At least you have in the past.
Mia: Mommy, it’s not the past anymore.
From the dining room, where she had been warily watching me vacuum the kitchen:
Mia: Are you all finished?
Me: Yep.
Mia (with her hand on her chest): Shoo-wee, Mommy. That was a close one.
At random times in perfect context, she also frequently says the following phrases:
“That wasn’t so bad, was it?”
“It’s as good as new!”
“It’s very important.”
“It was an accident. Do you forgive me?”*
“That’s awesome!”**
“That’s a GREAT idea, Mommy!”
And last night as we walked past Mia’s pediatrician’s house estate, which is on the opposite end of our street, and which I had pointed out to her on a walk several days ago, she said loudly, while our pediatrician’s husband and two of her kids were in the front yard, “THAT’S WHERE DR. L. LIVES!”
Note to self: shut the hell up in front of the kid.
*This one came directly from “Ni Hao, Kai-Lan.” No idea where she heard the rest of that stuff. No one has EVER made me laugh as hard as this kid does on a daily basis.
**Also from “Ni Hao, Kai-Lan.”
A question for you writers: do you ever read your own past work with an awful feeling in the pit of your stomach, a feeling that stems from the conviction that what you are reading–this stuff from a month or a year or two ago–is your best work, the most you are capable of, and you will never be able to write with such wit and skill again, so you might as well just take up another hobby, like cross stitchery or paint-by-number, because writing is clearly something you USED TO BE good at (back when you did not have to add an afterthought in parentheses to avoid ending a sentence in a preposition)?
I was just wondering. Because this morning, while lying in my bed with the cat sleeping soundly on my neck, I remembered a post I wrote a few years ago about what my cat and dog would say to each other if they could talk while I was at work. Semi-recent events (the death of the “talking” dog in that post) and current circumstances (the arrival of a new dog who is still finding her place with the cat who likes to crush my esophogeal passage) made me nostalgic about that post, so, using my mobile internet capabilities (so I wouldn’t disturb the cat, of course), I re-read that post, and about 10 others, and for about 22 seconds I felt inspired to rush down to the laptop and write. Write! Like a writer! With words and writing! Oh, calling that has eluded me! And then I turned on the computer and checked my Facebook and read some blogs on Google Reader and looked at some stuff on Twitter, and then Mia got up a whole hour early before I had even taken a drink of coffee, and for the rest of the day I have been grumpy and sullen, convinced that any writing skill I had before, back when I started this blog, and back when I was writing humorous stuff about being a teacher, and back in November when my beloved now-defunct Wondertime, may you rest in peace, offered me a writing gig HAS COMPLETELY AND TOTALLY DISAPPEARED.
Before I go on, I want you to know that I’m not asking any of you who might be reading this to praise my writing and boost my ego. That is so not my point, so don’t even go there. The truth is that I don’t really believe you can have an inherent skill that just “goes away,” and I’ve shamelessly said before that I believe writing is a skill that came packaged with my brain at birth. It’s something I’ve always excelled at and enjoyed, and I don’t think I can kill it with lack of use (the same cannot be said of my poor wilting biceps and quads, but that is a story for another day). And anyway, I write all the time. In my head. I am constantly thinking in complete sentences and paragraphs, crafting the description of an event, playing with words and phrases on an imaginary screen. A screen that sadly does not have a “publish” button. And so my point, which I do have, honestly, is that I don’t really think I’ve lost my creativity, or that I’m no longer a decent writer, but when I have time to be creative or put my skill to practice, I end up doing something else with my time (as well as the part of my brain that motivates me to be witty in print). Cue Facebook, Twitter, and iGoogle (and its many minions, including a Twitter gadget, a mini Facebook gadget, and Google Reader, so I don’t have to miss one of YOUR posts even as I ignore my own). So there’s that, and that’s a big deterrent, and I am not really sure I’m willing to give it up because of the access it allows me to so many people I never, ever see. But where to draw the line?
And then there is That Draft I Started Working on in December of 2007. Honestly, if I analyzed my blogging habits to date, I feel sure I would discover a marked decline that began around December of 2007. Remember that post I wrote about being a single drafter? And about how I have trouble starting something new before what I’m working on is complete? Well, take that trouble and multiply it by five billion when the incomplete piece is about the recurrent dreams I am having about my deceased grandmother, whose death still troubles me and whose last several years troubled me just as much. Every time I log into wordpress, thanks to the new and improved dashboard, I am reminded of that draft and its state of incompletion, and yet, because of the subject matter, I cannot bring myself to open it and finish it OR do away with it entirely, and so it hangs there in so many ways, rendering me incapable of giving myself over completely to new creativity and fresh ideas.
Even as I draw this ramble to a close–hurriedly, as I am already running late for a dinner gathering because I’ve spent entirely too much time on Facebook!–I feel like I’m at the same place I’ve been for the past several months: I want to write often like I used to, but I’m not sure how to make it happen. Do I give up Facebook and the like and use that time to write? Do I delete that draft and move on without it? I don’t think I have it in me to do either of those things, and thus far I haven’t found the draft’s ending yet so finishing it right up is not an option, either, so if you’re reading this and you have an idea, I’d sure like to hear it.
Since the “BEFORE” slideshow of my house has my address and some other personal information included, and since said slideshow would not allow me to right click and save the pictures to Flickr, I have password-protected the entire post. If you want to see it, email me, and if I actually KNOW YOU and you are not a creepy stalker, I’ll share the password.
