* * *
And I know you can’t help it.
I know that even if you wound the clock all the way back to the first time you can remember being this way—the moment you perceived that when you got things right, you got love, that when you achieved, you felt peace—that there’d probably still be no way to undo it. It’s in your nature. It wouldn’t matter if that moment or any other moment had happened differently.
You see yourself the way you think the world sees you, so you value yourself only when you are accomplishing and producing and finishing and succeeding. If you can’t value yourself, then there’s no reason to get up every morning, and if there’s no reason to get up, then . . . what? You feel untethered, as if someone has turned off gravity and you’ve been spun into infinite space, a black hole that demands, WHAT’S THE POINT OF YOU?
It would be embarrassing to explain all that to someone, I know. It’s awfully existential and weird to feel that if you get the punctuation wrong in a tweet, the world is a purposeless void. Not everyone gets it. So they don’t get that if you worry that much over the little things, the big things seem so much bigger than they already are. It’s bad enough wondering whether you’ve bought the right kind of sunscreen—are you living the right life? Should you change paths? Go back to school? Stay together or break up? Are you being the right kind of parent/daughter/sister/friend?
And I know that the more you do, the more it takes to feel like you’ve done enough. That’s why you say “Sure!” to everything and sweat all the small stuff. Then you can be the person who gets the job done and saves the day and then maybe you can rest.
* * *
So let me tell you: I approve of the organic lip balm in the eco-friendly tube that you used this morning because it’s good for your skin and also good for the planet. I saw that you waited at the four-way stop until it was your turn. I noticed that you RSVP’d to the invitations in your inbox promptly. Good work. You nailed it—all of it.
* * *
I know how much you need to hear this.
I can never hear it enough.
Stuck in Traffic
I sat in hours of gridlock every day, because although we chose to live in the middle of the city, the things we all needed to do—get the child’s allergy shots, pick up Girl Scout cookies, fetch the special medicine for the old dog—were flung all over the metropolitan sprawl. I look back on these as “the driving years,” and not just because everything and everyone was driving me crazy. To get one child to volleyball practice and another to lacrosse required an entire afternoon and evening spent in stop-and-go traffic, one kid always doing homework in the front seat while the other was on a field chasing a ball. The joke in Atlanta was that it took everyone a half hour to get to the end of their own street, but the truth was that most of the time it took twice that long to get anywhere.
I lived in my car, snacks and water stashed in the glove compartment because many days I spent so long sitting and breathing exhaust and staring at other cars’ license plates—the automotive equivalent of looking straight at the butt of the horse in front of you—that hours would pass since I had last eaten or before I could give a hungry child a real meal. Watching a light turn from green to yellow to red to green to yellow to red while I inched imperceptibly forward just to get to the ramp onto the highway to start on my way to where I was going made me seethe with impatience. I growled curse words at the other drivers even when they weren’t doing anything wrong, just because they were there. This happened for some portion of every day.
At home, when everyone was at school and I was not in my car, I got some sense of accomplishment from my work. I would take my coffee down to my office and open up a document to edit for a client, but although I loved the cleanliness and quiet of it, I felt cut off from the world, alone. The window looked out onto a gutter puking rotted leaves into the driveway. I had furnished my office with a “guest seat” in hopes that people might drop by in the mornings or pop in after the kids were down in the evenings for a glass of wine and a little conversation.
Coffee? I texted friends.
Can’t today—soon! they texted back.
My friends were busy with their families, their commitments, their lives, and their driving. No one ever came and sat in the guest seat.
Life happens in phases, and even friends your own age aren’t always in the same phase you are. With my babies now grown into big kids, I was ready to make more time in my life for non-child-related things. But lots of my friends were still having babies. Many were knee-deep in a phase of life that had the least possible time for other adults. But I felt like I was ready for my friends again, and my friends weren’t ready for me. They couldn’t linger over coffee in my office. They were still lingering over milk bottles.
I missed the sense of community I had back when I worked in an office with other people, so sometimes I crammed my laptop into my purse and drove to one of the hip coffee shops one mile (thirty minutes) away, where it always appeared through the big glass windows as if everyone was engaged in conversation, gesturing wildly and drawing things in notebooks. But my stupid giant SUV was such a tight fit in the Fiat-size parking slots that most of the time I got too nervous about hitting something and circled the block until I ran out of energy and went home.
I started sitting at my kitchen island during the day, scrolling through Twitter, staring out the window, avoiding going downstairs to get to work. I let deadlines slide while I sat around thinking up metaphors for what I felt like. Here’s one: My daily existence felt like a skin mask—the kind that comes in a jar and smells like flowers and sugar when you smooth it across your cheeks and forehead and chin, creamy and slick at first. Then it dries, and as it shrinks up, it tightens and sucks the moisture right out of your pores. It cracks and puckers around your eyelids so you can’t blink, and the only thing you can think about is that you must get it off right now, you must catch one flaky edge with your fingernail and peel it off—rip it off!—so that your skin can breathe again in the moist, warm air.
Here’s another: Imagine you had a sweater in your size, in the exact color you liked, in the cotton blend that slides softly over your arms as you pull it on each morning. And you wore this sweater every day, and it was the very best sweater, and then one day, something happened—you don’t know what, because you don’t recall putting it in the dryer or washing it in hot water—but now it is just enough too tight that the fabric bunches up around your rib cage, the seams itch, and you can’t lift your arms over your head. You wonder if you’ve somehow put it on backward, so you try to take it off and put it back on the right way, but you just get stuck in it more, and now your elbows are pinned to your face and there’s a sleeve over your mouth, and you’re in a full, smothered panic.
That’s what I felt like, but worse, and all the time. Something had fallen out of place in my head. Sometimes I had heart palpitations so violent I could see my chest flutter through my shirt, brought on by nothing at all. And when I didn’t feel that anxiety, I didn’t feel much of anything. I often thought, Shit, what right do I have to feel this way? It’s so stupid. I told myself to get over it, because people were depending on me. So I decided to keep going and doing the things I signed up to do, because it’s wasteful and self-indulgent to feel bad when so much is really quite good. It’s ungrateful, and I was not going to be ungrateful.
* * *
But I didn’t do a great job of “keep going.”
I didn’t answer my phone or check my voice mail.
I didn’t change out of pajamas during the day.
I saw no point in washing my hair.
I sat in my car in the parking lot by the soccer fields instead of getting out and waiting with the other parents.
I thought about sleep all the time. Some mornings, I could not fathom how I would get out of bed, even though the world that waited for me was beautiful and full of people I loved. When I was awake, I wished for sleep, and when I was asleep, I dreamed about b
eing dead. Not about actually killing myself or getting hit by a train or anything that dramatic, just being not alive. What was the point of waking up?
One night after the kids were asleep and while John was traveling for work, I opened a bottle of prosecco and drank the whole thing, sitting on my sofa by myself, pouring glass after glass into my favorite champagne flute—the one with little etched bubbles on the glass. (This is the ladylike version of pounding whiskey.) Life is short! Why not! This is a beverage I enjoy! I swallowed sip after fizzy sip, trying to feel something.
I woke up at 3 a.m. feeling like I had rubber bands knotted around my intestines, cold sweat soaking my hair, pajamas, and pillowcase. That was dangerous, I thought, sitting there drinking like that. I’m always tipsy after a glass and a half—no wonder I felt like a tank of pressurized vomit after a whole bottle. I was the only parent at home, and I got all-out drunk. I am a horrible mother. I am dangerous. What is wrong with me?
* * *
I stopped being on time—for anything. My whole life, I’d always arrived compulsively early. Suddenly I was the one always running behind. Or, if I did show up on time, I left some essential element at home—I’d make it to a meeting but forget all my notes. Whole chunks of my calendar slipped my mind.
On the first day of first and fourth grade for my kids, I forgot to pick them up.
The teacher on carpool duty called my cell phone at four o’clock (they got out at three) and said, “So . . . are you . . . coming?” I didn’t forget I had kids, I swear—I love my kids (is it ridiculous to have to say that?)—but I was getting worse and worse at keeping track of where we all had to be and when.
I often explained my frazzled lateness by saying, “Sorry, I’m trying to be three people.” I blamed my lost punctuality on the difficulty of juggling our calendars.
It wasn’t just that, though. I was distracted by more than the frenetic schedules of our household. All the other people I’d been and not been in my life were beginning to fight for their share of my brain space and their chance at a breath of real-life air, too. There were far more than three people crowded into my head. I felt like a human traffic jam.
Diane von Furstenberg’s Apartment
We always hurt the ones we love, the song says. Why? Because they’re there.
My therapist said I was depressed. And when I got depressed, I turned into a truly worthless spouse. It wasn’t that I blamed John for how I felt. But I couldn’t separate him from it, so I thought I needed to separate myself from him. Sweet John, who started doing all the laundry when he noticed I’d quit paying attention to the growing mountains of dirty clothes. Kind John, who brought home cupcakes when my doctor prescribed them (in addition to Zoloft). She said I should savor the positive sensation of slowly chewing a food I liked. He stood in the kitchen and watched as I rolled a bite of cake around in my mouth in exaggerated, cartoonish slow motion. “Are you savoring the sensation?” he asked. “I think so,” I said with a mouthful of thoroughly chewed cake.
“What if,” I asked after I swallowed my cake, “I got out of here?” I gestured widely, indicating that “here” was at least the kitchen, and probably the rest of the house.
“What do you mean?” he asked.
“Diane von Furstenberg and her husband keep separate apartments in Manhattan. Maybe we could do that.”
“Live in Manhattan?”
“Live separately.”
“Hmm.”
That’s where you’d expect someone to go, “What?” or to slam his glass down on the counter in shock or outrage. But big conversations like these are where the differences in our personalities really show. If someone says to me, “I need a break from you,” I immediately think, So you hate me? You never want to see me again? We’re ALL GOING TO DIE ALONE? Not John. He pauses. He thinks. He asks for clarification.
We had an hour-long discussion in which I tried to describe what I thought I meant, making it up as I went along. “Okay, what about this . . .” I kept saying, summoning every last scrap of my problem-solving, can-do attitude as I outlined imaginary logistics: co-parenting our children but with nights off for each of us, staying married and devoted to each other, but living in different homes. In the scenario I envisioned, John and the kids would stay in our house, with me in a smaller house or condo around the corner. Or maybe we’d take turns in the kid house. Maybe both houses would be the kid house? Walkable to each other, definitely. Next door? The more I talked about it, the more I wondered why all married people with kids didn’t keep two homes. Surely everyone wanted their space sometimes.
We had the conversation again the next day, and then again a week later.
“But . . .” John said, choosing his words carefully, “I don’t want you to leave me.”
“I wouldn’t be leaving you,” I said. “Just having a separate space. I’d still be with-you with you.”
“But everyone would think we were separated.” He was thinking through every angle. What it would mean for us, but also what it would mean for people around us. How much gossip would we have to deal with?
“And we could say, ‘Fuck you, everybody, it’s not your business,’ because we would know we were still married.”
“Would we need . . . another sofa? Two of everything?” Bless his practical soul. At no point did he panic. At no point did he raise his voice or call me insane.
He did want to know how we’d explain it—or would we explain it?—to parents and in-laws. “So when your mom comes to visit, you’d just act like you lived here?” he asked.
“Well, I don’t know. I don’t want to make the kids lie.” This was getting complicated.
“They’d be the only kids in school with still-married parents who live in separate houses.”
“Would they?”
If someone were watching us have this conversation without sound, it would probably look like we were talking about what kind of takeout to get for dinner.
I kept thinking, I don’t belong here, I need to get out, and I wanted space desperately, but as I tried to bring this hypothetical scenario into focus, I understood that I didn’t really want to be without John. I didn’t really want to be without our children. I wanted to step out of my everyday somehow—to hop in my time machine and let it lift me out of my life for a while—but I wasn’t able to translate this desire into anything realistic. I wanted to get “away” the way you tell someone to “go away” when you’re little and you don’t want to play with them anymore; and the person I didn’t want to play with anymore wasn’t John, but myself.
When you say “Go away,” you don’t care where the person goes, you just want them out of your sight. I wanted to put myself out of my own sight—out of my own regular life. I’d become an angry person who cursed at cars on the highway, a sad person who sat and stared out windows. I didn’t know how to fix myself, so I wanted to step away from the story in which this self was the main character.
But I couldn’t make a good guess at what “away” might look like. The idea of setting up separate households unraveled before it ever came together. John listened as I talked about it for several days, before eventually I let it go. It made no sense.
(I shouldn’t be surprised Diane von Furstenberg’s living arrangement didn’t fit me. Her wrap dresses never have either.)
* * *
Instead of thanking John for his patience and support throughout the months when I slumped like a sandbag on various pieces of furniture and made few, if any, useful contributions to our household, I often snapped at him. I blew up over tiny things. (“WHO PUTS A BOWL IN THE TOP RACK OF THE DISHWASHER?”) As I tried to pin my unhappiness to some cause, I made various arguments in which he’d have to share blame: Was I the beleaguered spouse, forced to give up her dreams and run carpools all day? No. No one forced any of my professional decisions, and if I wanted to change the carpooling schedule, nothing was stopping me. Was I tied down to domestic life, inhibited from a life of desert roaming and deep-sea fishing b
ecause I had children to drive around town? No. I mean, I did have children to drive around town, but (a) I wanted children. No one just handed me kids I didn’t want to raise. And (b) I knew damn well that left to my own devices, I don’t really do any deep-sea fishing or desert roaming. None of it added up.
Still, my mind tried to find ways to resent him, because he’d been there all along, part of every adult decision I’d ever made. If I was miserable where I’d ended up, wasn’t that a little bit his fault?
One evening, waving the paper towel I’d just torn off to wipe the countertops, I said, “I mean, what if I wanted to go bungee jumping tomorrow? I have meetings! I have carpool! I couldn’t even go!”
“Do you want to go bungee jumping?” he asked.
“No. The point is EVERYTHING HERE IS KEEPING ME FROM BUNGEE JUMPING. Why aren’t you listening?”
* * *
We go through life looking for proof that our choices have been right. Psychologists call this confirmation bias. If you’re a scientist, confirmation bias in experiments can lead to errors, because without realizing it you give greater weight to any findings that support your hypothesis and make excuses for findings that don’t. You draw faulty conclusions, because you’re not being objective.
In our personal lives, we also look for proof that our choices have been right. Even when it comes to small everyday decisions, we can talk ourselves into justifying a wrong as a right, because that feels better than saying we were wrong. (How many eyeshadows do I own that make my eyelids look like gilded lizards? Several. But I don’t get rid of them, because I’ve already bought them and I don’t want to believe I wasted my money.)
Here’s the problem with taking that approach to life all the time: It’s totally normal to look around every now and then and see that some things aren’t working—that you need to adjust the dials, retool your life a bit. That’s what people do. But you have to overcome confirmation bias in order to do that. You have to be willing to call something wrong, to say something feels bad. That’s hard enough for any human being. For me, a person whose very identity and peace rely on looking at things and thinking, Yes, that’s right, looking at my own emotional state and feeling, No, that’s wrong, was more than unsettling. It felt disproportionately catastrophic. It made me think, Wait, if I’m not the person who makes the right choices all the time, then who am I? That I might have made choices that were “right” at one time but feel “wrong” right now seemed impossible. Right choices are supposed to feel right forever . . . right?
I Miss You When I Blink Page 14
