in the mood for love

My mom has often worried aloud that it is my parents’ divorce (or, as I might put it, their twenty-two-year-long bad marriage) that lies at the heart of me almost always being single. I’ve tried to assure her that that isn’t so; that I never concluded that marriage was something to avoid. Yet the older I get, and the longer I remain perpetually single, the more I recognize the role my parents played in shaping my thinking about romantic partnership.

I remember seeing my parents kiss once, and only once. That night my dad brought my mother flowers—a large bouquet, probably of roses—and gave them to her in the kitchen. I don’t recall the ensuing kiss lasting very long; but afterward, I think they were smiling. I couldn’t tell you if there were other romantic moments in their marriage; if so, I wasn’t privy to them. There were certainly plenty of fine days, when we enjoyed pleasant family time together along the pine-needled paths of a mountainside or beneath the dark sky of a summer night. But something I never witnessed—had no model for, no real understanding of—was the two of them making decisions together, operating as a unit together. I think of them more in their individual happy places, introducing me each to their own true loves. My mother spent so many hours of my childhood kicking and pulling pottery into beautiful forms, gardening, painting, cooking. My father would entertain us in his study, connecting our Apple IIe to the tv so we could play Frogger and PacMan at his feet while he solved equations on yellow sheets of lined paper; letting us shoot marbles around him in the living room while he paced across the carpet, considering questions of theoretical physics; taking us into the woods of north Georgia and showing us trilia and may apples and the footprints of muskrats. Their passions converged only in nature and Bob Dylan. Their backgrounds—strikingly similar, both with foreign-born Jewish mothers who shed their religion in the light of anti-Semitism and, after coming to the United States, became chemists, and married chemists, and decided in the 1950s to send their children to Unitarian Sunday school to help them fit in; their strikingly similar backgrounds were the thing, I think, that must have drawn them together when they met as PhD students at the same university.

But those commonalities never seemed to suffice in terms of marriage, despite my parents clearly feeling both love and intellectual respect for each other. If I learned one thing from their marriage, it’s that all the love and respect in the world amounts to squat if you can’t actively show it in a productive way; if you can’t change yourself to meet the mutual needs of the two people in love; if you don’t want to change yourself to be half of a dyad committed in love. And because they didn’t seem to want that unification of their two worlds, and because the marriage they did have was so painful for us all, I ended up believing in individualism and independence so much that perhaps, despite all kinds of pining away for certain guys, I never formed a true desire for a relationship at a young age. What I wanted from dating as a teenager and in my early twenties was not the building of a world together—that was so far from my understanding of how life works; all I wanted was to love and be loved. The terror my mother felt about being able to support herself after her divorce had left me fully committed, at age fifteen, to making sure that I could always take care of myself; expecting someone else to do that was not part of any life equation in my mind. When I did fall in love with someone toward the end of college, I think that commitment to thriving on my own may have prevented the magical-seeming development between us from landing where it seemed all along to be heading; may have prevented me from fully letting him in. Being able to identify what doesn’t work isn’t the same as understanding how to pull off the thing that would; I think I was both scared of love and oblivious to how to do it. Though I value immensely my ability to know what I need to be happy all on my own, perhaps in strengthening a part of me up to achieve that I also built walls that kept me from seeing something that so many other people take for granted. It is only in my thirties that I have decided I might not just not mind but also would actually like and truly want to share my world, my heart, my choices with someone else. Having had no model of a strong marriage until my adult years, when my brother and certain friends undertook relationships that I admire, I’ve only recently begun to be able to think of being part of a pair as a good thing without eliciting in myself feelings of guilt.

Having concluded that I would like to get married, that I actively hope to meet someone for whom I am happy to give up some of my independence, is a big step for this girl writing to you right now. It’s a big deal for me to be feeling as I have been this past week. It’s not about the particular person whose visit stimulated these emotions; rather, it’s about me seeing my own comfort in both being playful and sweet with him. It’s about an awakening. After all these years on my own, the prospect that I could one day delight in sharing my world with another now leaves me absolutely, positively in the mood for love.

re-membering

“Re-energize by being energetic.” It was just a note I wrote during a phone call. We hadn’t said it out loud; it wasn’t one of the action items my professional coach and I set for me that week. But it felt like the sum total of what we were saying, and I didn’t want to forget it. Beth was challenging me to host three dinner parties in one month; I was saying I would get back to writing at least once a week. I needed to truly commit to myself that I would do these things; so I wrote that statement, and I put a star by it, and I circled the star. I needed not to forget it.

I was coming up on my first anniversary at my current job—a job that was the culmination of a year of graduate study and many more years of pondering; a job that signified the beginning of my second career, the honoring of a long-held belief that perhaps, though writing and editing satisfied me almost completely, there was more for me to achieve; something greater out there for me to do. I had decided, after nearly fifteen years of working with young people on the side of full-time things, to blow out that commitment to low-income youth by bringing my full range of talents to bear on it.

For years I had wondered if I would be able to work in a people-oriented environment. I knew it would be completely different than the research-write/edit-revise-and-refine world I had inhabited for nine years, which a few months into my new career I closed my eyes and remembered through a single symbolic image: me seated in a warmly lit dark room sipping a cup of tea. For almost a decade, my notion of working was to quietly produce pages, chapters, and books from somewhere within me. I had spent hours reading source material, still more hours reworking paragraphs to perfection; meetings with others never took more than two or three hours a week of my time. I typically spent a year and a half to two years on each project.

Now almost all I do during the day is talk to people. I go to meeting after meeting after meeting, often driving from location to location and sometimes finding myself in as many as six in one day; when those are done, I go to my programs, where I check in on staff, work with students—try to find the reward for all the fast-paced, stressful, way-more-than-40-per-week hours of managing 65 staff in the service of 700 children in four different schools and two school districts. I rarely spend more than 20 minutes working on any one thing. I rarely see a tangible outcome of my toils—so rarely that last week, I felt a shiver of euphoria after creating a two-page Tips for Tutoring document to hand out to volunteers. I rarely see physical evidence of all that I spend so much time on. I rarely feel that I make or do anything.

Mostly, I support others in doing. Though I work in youth development, my main focus is staff development; rather than getting to revise and refine anything myself, I spend a tremendous amount of time helping other people effectively revise and refine what they do. This shouldn’t surprise me; it is the blueprint for any managerial job. And though I’m getting quite good at it, I’m not sure it always satisfies me to be good at helping others do well at their jobs. According to a BBC career quiz I took online recently, I should undertake work that is creative and inventive. Though certainly both adjectives describe many of the initiatives I take on at work—like assessing our organizational processes and structures (or lack of them) and getting my staff to put more efficient ones in place, or motivating the staff to create programming that brings our organizational mission into all grade levels—after taking that quiz I couldn’t bring myself to close the results for a day or two, because they also say that I should be making things. That there is something different about stimulating others to do things and doing things yourself.

Human beings really do differ, I’ve realized. Some work well one way and others work well a different way. I watch many of my staff thrive on coordinating and motivating people. And though I am good at these tasks, I feel that I thrive when I am the one quietly, slowly designing and refining things until they are perfect. I am, I think, not just a former editor but forever an editor; studying the structure and contents of a thing, deciding how they could better suit their purpose, and implementing changes to make them do so is the process I am prone to take with everything. The first two parts of that sequence are what my friend Meg would call taking something from 0 to 90%: getting it up and running and out the door. The last part of the sequence is going from 90 to 100%, and I seem to feel lost when I don’t get to that part; I feel an important part of me has been left dormant.

The kicker, when I reflect on my nature and whether it is a fit for the job I’m currently in, and the thing that has made me so confused and befuddled that it’s been hard to have anything much to say (write) for the past year, is that despite not feeling a fit with my job, I feel unbelievably proud of it, of the place I work, of the amazing things the people I work with do daily with young people. I never felt that sort of emotion when working in textbook publishing—not once in nine years. The paradox that that knowledge embedded in my mind silenced me, plagued my sleep, pushed me, even, into depression. It sapped me of my energy.

I’ve known for months that I needed to get that energy back. That I believe in living not just a little but a lot, and that I know how to. That I have always done that in the past. I feel like I could write a book on how to live a balanced, enriching life. Yet it has been a huge struggle for me since starting this job to achieve what used to be an absolutely ingrained, normal way of being. This job knocked me on my ass. It has hogged the hours in my week, hogged the energy in my body, hogged the people-person-ness that I always thought defined me. Right now I am fighting both to reach a place of always loving it and to put boundaries on it. I am fighting to want to stay in my job and to get the rest of my life back.

It’s hard to radically alter your world, though, when you feel lethargic, blue, subdued. Depression is vicious in that it builds on itself; you become less and less able to reach out to the things you know would make you feel right because you are too pinned down by it to bother. That’s why it was so important for me, one day six or so months in to working with Beth, to share something more than just professional with her; to share the personal struggles too. I wasn’t going to be able to be happy with the job until I was also happy with my life. So we sat on the phone together identifying things I used to do in my personal life that made me feel whole; identifying ways to re-member myself and in so doing get the blood flowing back through all my veins.

It is hard to put words to the good feeling of seeing myself begin to make the necessary little changes. First it was seeing the fruition of a promise to myself to go hiking every weekend of summer. Then it was the cooking—initially just for one friend, but now a handful of them have been indulged. Next it was the writing—not yet weekly, but I’m picking up the pace. And lately it’s been the social—the conquering of will power over doing work when I know it’s time for resting; the conquering of will power over resting when I know it’s time for living. I’ve been organizing monthly parties, spontaneously leaving work early and going to the movies, and even, this week, playing hooky to indulge a long-held impulse when a certain high school friend came to town.

It’s hard to feel that anything is more needy of my attention than these kids who are receiving so little of what they deserve, but lately I’ve been squelching the inclination to feel guilty when cutting back on the time I give them and instead just feeling good that I am giving me what I need too. I know that I will have nothing to give them if I have run myself into the ground; so I have let go of the guilt of putting a boundary on that work. And maybe (I hold myself to no predictions these days, but maybe) the result of freeing myself from that sense of responsibility will be that I will re-energize myself so fully that I will be able find satisfaction in the ways in which I do fit so well with this new career. My staff always tells me how keenly that’s true. Maybe I will eventually appreciate it too.

(vacation)

sometimes the brain needs to air out:
like laundry drying in the breezes of a warm day
not just shedding moisture
but acquiring, too,
the aromas of the world around it,
a sprinkle of pollen, or even a lady bug—
becoming not just dry but also a touch pad
for tiny spores or even wings
whose involvement may seem inconsequential to the task
of regaining its initial character
but nothing could be more essential to longevity
than the inadvertent adhesion of the thing itself and something new

room to breathe

We are in the midst of the discussion when my mother changes gears. She had been commiserating with me in frustration over my brother's lack of involvement in our family in recent years. This is a topic she gets easily riled up about, as—since moving to his wife's country seven years ago—my brother has only returned home once, and never with his children. But in this moment, as I admit that he has entirely ceased calling me—which I used to be able to count on him doing once a week without fail—tears begin to flood my cheeks, and some mothering instinct kicks in, allowing her to see the situation, finally, in a new way.

"It's that apartment," she explains, suddenly uncritical of him for the problem; "no one has any room to breathe in there." My sister-in-law, she points out, grew up in a crowded home, sharing her small bedroom with a sister and an aunt for many of her younger years; she is used to this. My brother isn't. Even more than us—my mom and I both now living in apartments with no outdoor spaces, no patios even—he has no space to himself, no yard or even just a quiet room to move into when decompressing time is needed. Mentally we both compare that to the small house in which I grew up—snug but surrounded by land, by grass and bamboo stalks, a thick stand of trees and a creek. That is what he and I grew up thinking of as a home: a place with indoor and outdoor rooms: opportunities for family members to be together and to be apart.

Suddenly the concept of three children under age five and two parents living in a two-bedroom apartment seems ludicrous to me. Their apartment is hardly bigger than my own—in which I, living all alone, often feel captive, having never before, in 33 years, lived anywhere that didn't have some sort of green outdoor area to it. I would go out of my mind if I had to daily share this amount of space with four other people—three of whom, though marvelous in so many ways, are loud, ever making noise, constantly in motion. I picture his face when he sits in his living room playing his heart out on the guitar for 20 or 30 minutes each day, and despite the frenzy of games and paintings and children's books at his feet, despite the dancing of toddler toes around him, despite the effort of more than one little set of fingers to work their way between the frets alongside his--despite all those intrusions, for those 20 or 30 minutes each day, his eyes are shut, and perhaps only then is he ever anything like alone.

Perhaps, my mother suggests, his life is simply too crazed with all children beyond baby stage and in such a small home that he steals any quiet moments for himself instead of for calls with me. And perhaps that's all he really can do, she sees now.

She has, after all these years of being mad at him, discovered a sense of sympathy. Now I must learn to give him that emotional space too.

the will to live

What I am trying to muster is not a physical, keep-your-lungs-going kind of thing. Living is a lot more than breathing, than organs smoothly operating. The way I mean to do it is more like flying, like knowing the world from both earthly and aerial views; more like what these poets and a young I have described:

Octavio Paz:
Freedom is wings,
the wind in leaves, pausing over
a simple flower....


Neruda:
To
rise
to
the
sky
you
need

two wings,
a violin,
and so many things....


Little Lara:
butterfly wings
can’t take you high but
they will carry you low
where you can see
and they will sparkle under the sun’s light
as you rise
into the deep blue sky

delicate butterfly wings will carry you
where you can see


Cowboy Junkies (Townes Van Zandt lyrics):
to live is to fly
low and high
so shake the dust off your wings
and the sleep out of your eyes


E.E. Cummings:
who are you, little i

(five or six years old)
peering from some high

window;at the gold

of november sunset

(and feeling:that if day
has to become night

this is a beautiful way)


A.R. Ammons:
I look for the way
things will turn
out spiraling from a center,
the shape
things will take to come forth in

so that the birch tree white
touched black at branches
will stand out
wind-glittering
totally its apparent self:

I look for the forms
things want to come as

from what black wells of possibility,
how a thing will
unfold:

not the shape on paper--though
that, too--but the
uninterfering means on paper:

not so much looking for the shape
as being available
to any shape that may be
summoning itself
through me
from the self not mine but ours.


What I am trying to muster is not a physical, keep-your-lungs-going kind of thing.
I am trying to regain a certain way of seeing the world that once came as naturally to me as breathing; a way of making the moments of life into the verses of poetry.

nascent joy

It is hard to imagine experiencing the recounted scene: being on duty that evening, among the first responders, in the midst of the work of your profession and having that place you in the position of being the one to pull a severed hand from the dismembered, burning car, to then discover the face of a friend in the remains of two vehicles that moments earlier carried, respectively, a drunk driver and a young family—a couple and their two-months-old child whom you, the firefighter, had babysat the night before. It was the end of that career for him. This was probably 25 or 30 years ago, based on the gray in his hair now, but the memory clearly still haunts him. We only sat together on the bus for a matter of minutes, but when the banter turned from baseball to my profession, out of friendliness I returned the question, his cheerful chattiness with the men seated around us not suggesting to me any territory that would be hard for him to pass back through.

When he’d gotten on he’d sat across from me, smiling at my neighbor in the Giants jacket and asking about tonight’s game. All I’d thought at first was how sports can bring any two people together—the one a slick-haired white guy, donning a track suit and carrying a satchel with Oracle’s name sewn into it, leading me to suspect he was a comfortably retired professional; the other a pock-cheeked, yellow-toothed, shaky-voiced black man, whom I would later learn is a recovering meth addict struggling to comply with his counselor’s seemingly contradictory requirements that he take anti-depressants while he attempts to relieve himself of a substance reliance. Not long into their talk about the west coast final to be played tonight, a third man—latino, cheerful in his mustache, shorts, and flip flops despite the Vietnam Veterans hat atop his head—pitched in his own thoughts on the game, and I was so enjoying the affinity quickly felt among these representatives of different walks of life that I began to smile behind my magazine, inspiring the first one to ask if I followed baseball. To their delight, I responded definitively but kindly no, the sport moving too slowly for my tastes; my bold honesty thankfully coming across as sassy in a good way. Just minutes later, to make room for a passenger in a wheelchair, the first man moved to sit between the Giants fan and me, and there they began to jovially interrogate me about what I do for work, whether I am married, how I am possibly in my 30s given what they identified as youthful looks. Out of respect I asked what the instigator of all this communication among strangers does for work, and that’s when he explained that once he was a firefighter, but just for a few years. Perhaps I shouldn’t have asked why he quit the profession, but the conversation was so casual and friendly that I felt no inhibition about doing so.

After he departed, getting off near the Social Security office that was his destination, the other man, the one with the sports jacket, looked expectantly at me, so I resumed conversation, asking what he did for work that, as he had already mentioned, had him riding this daily bus to San Francisco. He made an expression like blushing before explaining that his rehab clinic is in the city, that he takes a bus and a train and the MUNI each day to receive treatment, then returns home to care for his 80-year-old mother with dementia and closed-off 85-year-old father. He told me how smart, beautiful, and warm his mother still is, contrasted stories of her with a regretful statement about his hard relationship with his father. We went on in this vein for the rest of the bus ride, him sharing his challenges, me suggesting opportunities he could find to live outside himself: to give to others through volunteer work in order to clear his head of his own concerns or come to believe that he is needed by someone, somewhere, and not to feel so alone. The darkness of his mindset was evident, yet he was enlivened by our conversation, telling me that he would love to take me home to his mother, quickly following that with a “but you would never want me like that” laced with a hopeful glance in my direction. I remained focused on the discussion of him taking care of himself, and he said he’d like to live a moral life like mine—he appreciating my current profession immensely. He said he thanked God that we were having this conversation, that it was going to change his perspective. I asked if he might talk to his minister about opportunities to do service through his church, and he liked the idea but doubted he would really follow through on it. Now I asked him to be sure to do it. His response was that he thought God had put an angel on the bus with him today. Though I do not believe in either entity, I told him that if anyone on the bus was there to give him a wake-up call, it was the first man, who had triggered the whole conversation.

Craig, as I now knew his name to be, then turned to me sharply and said as though with relief, “I saw he had the NA badge on his clothes.” I had to ask for clarification, and he explained the acronym—for Narcotics Anonymous. At a moment like that even I wanted to believe in fate. But what mattered was that Craig believed in it, in God making plans for him. So I said warmly that I thought God was feeling favorably toward him today, and after that he smiled at me quietly before stating that though he might never see me again, he would not forget me. We said only little things after that, him checking that I knew which airport stop to de-board at and asking to carry my bag off for me. But I was left thinking that two people who really needed someone or something had found each other on this day, and though they had spent all of ten minutes together, and though they perhaps each left thinking more of my involvement in the conversation than each other’s, they had found in each other a shared struggle; and in recognizing each other, they had shown the outward signs of nascent joy.

(exhalation)

Writing, I have always said, is like breathing for me. A regular habit, you could take that to mean, and I often have; but it’s something else as well, I remembered while reading the latest work of fiction by a dear friend; it’s a vital processing—the inhalation of what life gives you, the exhalation of something you’ve done with those things, something you’ve done to make them useful.

Early in my years of writing, I crafted pure fiction—the kind that contains no semblance of real events. Still, for me producing it was an autobiographical effort, as I took deeply churning emotions from inside me and released them in new form, using their intensity, if not their exact essence, to flavor short stories and poems. The pains of growing up the child of a fragile marriage and, later, a volatile divorce was not something I could, as a teenager, write about directly; it’s not something to this day I would feel inclined to put in public terms. It is a too uniquely defining element of who I am for me to gain anything from simply stating it. But to work it like the clay my mother used to spend hours spinning and lifting into gorgeous forms; to turn it over in my hands like my father would the plastic replicas of molecular structures, considering their elemental components and using these to inspire creative thinking—to contemplate it as an essential input into a system—my system of well being—through which I could spin it into something like poetry, now that felt productive. That felt like healing.

In later years, as I began to encounter other stimuli for my emotions, I took the vital process in a new direction, creating fiction infused with real stories that I recast in characters’ lives. In this way, I not only rinsed the emotions out in a metaphorical washing cycle but also sifted through the thoughts of mine left dangling from these memorable moments or experiences and found marvelous revelations, the way once upon a time I sifted through dirt piled over hundreds of years atop a Maya kitchen and in it found objects of utility, beauty, and skill. The new process felt like discovering artistry within me. Like discovering that in addition to being able to right myself internally I could also sculpt from what I had known something of poetic worth.

That others enjoyed reading my writing was delightful, rewarding, exciting. Yet it had never been what drove me. What did so was that fundamental physical need: that productive processing of experiences, that acceptance and then ensuing output of them—that way of letting go of them enough to get myself going forward from them, to avoid loitering romantically or regretfully in the past. Writing gave me the opportunity to return to a creative work and consider its craftsmanship—rather than revisiting a memory and the feelings that may have come with it.

I have for years admired this friend who also writes fiction for her skill with words, her resonant capturing of human experience on paper as though it were three-dimensional. I am reminded now, after closing her elegant recent work, that she breathes her words as I do, infuses her own experiences, aches, and ascensions into her fiction for the dual sakes of artistry and wellness—and for that I am profoundly glad for her. To see her undertake this in the very way I myself have found to be so enlivening inspires me and also obligates me. I know I can only honor her (our) effort by returning to the act I am undertaking now: by writing, by letting out a long held-in breath and with it, I hope, at least some of what’s caused me to keep it in.