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Quite Contrary


 

My daughter will tell you, even if you don’t ask, that she is very lucky because she has two dads. Right from the start I emphasized whenever I could with her that we were lucky. We had a daddy in heaven who loved and watched over us and even though that wasn’t always as nice as having one who lived with us, it was still pretty good. When Rob came along and we became engaged, Katy and I would talk about how lucky we were to now have two dads.  That’s not to say that there weren’t tears and sad times. There were and sometimes still are, but I was determined from the start that Katy was not going to grow up feeling as though her life has been ruined or tainted in some way by what happened to her father. I did this as much for Will as I did for her.

 

Will’s father died when he was not quite seven. His father was an alcoholic who fell asleep at the wheel after a night of drinking and drove himself off an embankment near a bridge and into the water. It was Labor Day weekend, and Will could remember the State Police coming to the door and then being sent up to his room. His mother was in her early thirties and his a dad a few years younger. Will was always sketchy on the details of what happened next, but I got the impression that was more of a reluctance rather than an inability to recall. One thing he was never in doubt about was how his mother had set out to instill in him a sense of being different from other kids and other families. Her widowhood marked them for slights and abuse in her view, and she made certain that he never forgot that their lives would have been so much better had his father not died. Once I asked him about that. Would it have been better? Whenever I asked about his father, or his early childhood, I got stories rather than answers. This time I got the story about how his father and his mother’s younger sister had given him alcohol once when his mother was away. She returned to find him quite sick and when she confronted his dad about it ….. well, he had found the whole thing funny. Getting a five year old drunk. Will went on to remark that it wasn’t until years later at a Thanksgiving dinner that his mom’s sister had drunkenly confessed to having had an affair with her brother-in-law during that time period. I guess “better” like most things is a relative term. 

 

Will never felt he was as good as his friends who had two living parents. He thought perhaps that his lack of fathering had made him less of a man. Another legacy from his mother, who constantly decried the lack of male influence in his life. He felt too that the only luck he had was bad luck. When we learned we couldn’t have children without help, he wondered aloud why bad things like this always happened to him. Of course he wasn’t always so pessimistic. He dreamed and had a vision of a future that was surprisingly optimistic, and his early influences receded more and more as we built our life together.

 

When he was in hospice, I made certain that Katy visited often and that our time was as normal as any family. We ate meals there. Me spoon feeding Will and Katy sitting at the foot of his bed eating off the tray the aides would bring for her. We played Candy Land on his bed and watched videos. All the while she thinking this was what families do and what dad’s are like and Will was  curled in a fetal position staring blindly and unknowingly into space right past us both. After he died, I made sure that we didn’t talk about his death as a negative that happened to us. People get sick sometimes, I told her, and they don’t get better. Doctors can’t fix every problem and people go to live in heaven. It makes us sad and daddy sad but we are still a family and we still love each other. 

 

I never blamed his death for anything that happened. If we didn’t have money for something it was because mama hadn’t finished her masters yet but when she did, things would be better. If we had to spend the weekend on our own, we went out and did something together. When other kids at her school had mom’s and dad’s to drop them off in the morning or pick them up at night, well, we didn’t and that was okay and maybe someday we would have a dad too.

 

When Rob came along one of the first things I needed to know was if he was okay with being a father to Katy. He had actually given that a great deal of thought before he even approached me with his feelings for me. Katy, unsurprisingly took to him right away. She’d never had a father in the active sense of the word.

 

About six weeks ago, the two of them planted a garden. Lettuce, potatoes, radishes and carrots. She was thrilled by the entire process though I think the digging and the watering are her favorites parts. Since then we have watched as things have grown and turned that once forlorn space into a garden. Last evening they “harnessed” the lettuce for our supper salad. As I took pictures it occurred to me yet again that this is what families do, and that I have done a pretty good job these last four years.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

The Women’s Locker Room


I’m not modest. No shock or even mild surprise there, eh?  Even when I was a fat teenager and awkward co-ed living in the dorm, I didn’t have a problem with nudity. Not really. When Will and I were first living together he asked me out of the blue one day if I ever put clothes on when I was inside the house. He was teasing me but only just. I don’t know if Rob is as taken aback by my clothing optional ways once the wee one is tucked in for the night but given the fact that the neighbors once had to ask his late wife, Shelley, to talk to him about the possibility of adding a towel or robe to his early morning attire, I highly doubt it.

 

The one place where one would think that au naturel would not be a problem is the changing room at the gym or the swimming pool, and maybe it is just a Canadian thing, but I have never been so weirded out by women’s reactions to my changing into and out of my running clothes. I embarrassed some woman again today at the DCC fitness center. I was about half dressed after showering when she rounded the corner of the locker bay and seeing me topless, did a half retreat, stuffed her jacket hurriedly into the closest locker and fled. This isn’t the first time I have gotten strange looks for changing in a changing room either. It’s happened several times. Always with much younger women. Even at the town’s public pool, I noticed that everyone changed in little cubicles that were most impractical for mothers with children due to their size and configuration. I asked Rob about this one night when his friend Chris was visiting and they both assured me that Canadian men at least, have no such problem with locker room nudity and neither knew of any cultural precedent for what I had experienced. Rob did mention to me later though that Shelley hadn’t any problem either with using a changing room for its assigned purpose but both his daughters made mad dashes for any privacy they could find when having to change in a public locker room. 

 

So, maybe it is a generational thing? That would be ironic. A generation of young women whose clothing is by design quite revealing, and not always in a flattering way, harbors a latent prudish streak. I guess that makes sense really. The chief complaint my female high school students had about P.E. class, which incidentally was the main reason so many of them failed, was that they wouldn’t dress out for class. Not because they were worried about getting sweaty or didn’t want to participate in the activities but because if they changed their clothes, someone would see them naked. Other female someones. Who would judge them. Negatively. Never mind that these were girls in clothing so tight and in some cases scanty that what they looked like was not really a mystery to anyone with even a half a mind to speculate about it.

 

Still, just another thing about Canada that I find perplexing. That and the fact that I have yet to walk into a washroom stall and find that the toilet seat hasn’t been liberally sprayed. 

There Art Thou Happy


 

In late October of 2005 my husband was in hospice after nearly dying of aspiration pneumonia and blood clots in his lungs, and my father was struggling to recover from a serious of small strokes that nearly killed him as well. I was a caretaker on all fronts because in addition to Will and propping up my mother, I had a three year old and was teaching at-risk high school students in a drop out prevention program. I wasn’t to the point, yet, of being actively dismissive of other people’s problems, but I was close. It’s not that I didn’t complain sometimes. I did. I had friends who listened, but I was still aware that being heard requires some reciprocal listening, and I did my best. At least I hope I did. 

 

When you are in the middle of a crisis, it’s hard to think about anything else. After a while even being asked to consider something other than your own problems seems like your troubles are being dismissed as less than the tragedy they are. There are some people to whom all manner of difficulties are mountains. My youngest sister is engaged to an alcoholic. Around the time that Will was first in hospice and our dad was recovering from his strokes, her fiance was heading off to jail for  a few months. He’d gotten his third DUI over the previous summer while riding his lawnmower home from the bar one evening. I guess he didn’t realize that with a suspended license he wasn’t allowed to ride any type of motorized vehicle on the road though my sister argued that this was unfair as he was on the side of the road and a lawnmower isn’t a threat to anything but tall grass. Anyway, she and her then 11 year old son lived with our parents and since our folks had basically taken over the raising of my nephew, my sister had been free to live the life of the teenager she will always be. Dad’s illness however put quite a crimp in her lifestyle. Mom wasn’t able to take full charge of her son, and she was balking at the idea of having to stay home on the weekends to parent her own child for a change. Being the oldest, I was usually asked to “please talk to your sister” whenever she and Mom were at an impasse. So, I listened while my sister complained about how unfair and difficult her life was. At one point in the conversation, in an attempt to show empathy…..I think….she compared her upcoming separation from her boyfriend to my husband’s impending death. I don’t think I got angry with her at the time. I was too stunned. The comparison went even beyond what could be considered self-absorption, even for my sister, but I think about that incident often now when I catch myself being exasperated with people who can’t seem to realize that the trees hemming them in are part of a vast forest that we all are trying to navigate.

 

After Will died and I had regained enough strength to look around at my new world and pay more than scant attention to the people in it, I had the widow’s blinkered view of tragedy. That is simply, I am widowed…..top that. I am ashamed to admit that I not only felt I had a right to such a view, but I supported others who felt they same way. I am not sure when that started to change. Maybe around the time I began to believe that taking as much time as I wanted to rail at life and the universe was, perhaps, not the best use of my time. It certainly wasn’t making my life better. Didn’t find me a sitter. Wasn’t the recipe for rebuilding my shattered social network. Couldn’t renovate and update my shabby home or find me a job that didn’t alternate between boring me to tears and making me crazy with frustration. What exactly was I doing, standing on the shore and letting wave after wave of sadness and regret batter my soul black and blue? I was told, by people I assumed knew better than I, that this was active grieving, and I wondered, shouldn’t I be just as actively trying to live again?

 

Two years is the minimum  and five the maximum for recovery from the loss of a spouse. That’s what I have been told over and over and I questioned it as often as I parroted it to other freshly minted widows. But the people I knew, my friends and my family, were of a different mind. Partly because they had no frame of reference, but mostly because they loved me and they could see what I already knew which was that grieving was killing me slowly even while it was burying me alive. It was distorting my ability to gauge the height of the molehills that litter that forest in which we all dwell. My husband died, but that didn’t make my troubles more important than those of anyone else.  Not everything that was wrong with my life was the result of his death. I was not cursed by the universe because this had happened. The people in your life generally speak from an understanding of any type of tragedy as their upbringing and life experiences allow and even if their experiences don’t match your own, this doesn’t invalidate their observations. Stuck is fairly easy to recognize. You don’t need much of a background to know when someone is spinning their wheels. Even though I was most ungrateful, I started to realize that despite how I felt, I was surviving this most awful of events and I needed to start being more of an example and a cheerleader to people who needed the same kind of support I had received at my lowest. And not just widowed people, though I have a special affinity for them, but everyone. People who need a sounding board or a bit of verbal hand holding as they make their way out and away from whatever despair or trouble that plagues them is something I see as giving back. It’s tiring though. Some people are “tough rooms”, and there are times I wish I could give a Friar Lawrence scolding to some. He is a character in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet, the one who secretly marries the two and then comes up with the not so bright idea to have Juliet “play dead”. At one point in the play, Romeo is crying because as a result of killing Juliet’s cousin, he has been banished from the city and his new bride. Friar Lawrence loses his patience and reminds Romeo of all the really awful things that could have happened instead with the following:

What, rouse thee, man! Thy Juliet is alive,

For whose dear sake thou wast but lately dead.

There art thou happy. Tybalt would kill thee,

But thou slewest Tybalt. There art thou happy too.

The law, that threat’ned death, becomes thy friend

And turns it to exile. There art thou happy.

A pack of blessings light upon thy back;

Happiness courts thee in her best array;

But, like a misbehaved and sullen wench,

Thou pout’st upon thy fortune and thy love.

Take heed, take heed, for such die miserable.

 

Not that it’s always possible to find a “bright side” but there is usually something to be grateful for and something worse that could have resulted. Worse than  dead spouse? No, but worse circumstances to find yourself in after than most people experience. If it weren’t for my aunt I would have lost our house after Will took sick and was diagnosed because we lost nearly half our income overnight. If it weren’t for a righteously indignant email to my state senator, Will would have died before we could have gotten him on disability. If I didn’t have friends in the home health care and social work industry, I wouldn’t have found a nursing home to take him when it was clearly time. If I hadn’t worked in a really great school with an awesome principal and coworkers who believed in circling the wagons around colleagues, I could have lost my job. There art thou happy. People don’t do that kind of assessing enough and aren’t encouraged to either. It’s easier to pity and enable self-pity then risk a bit of hurt and anger. 

 

And just as there is nearly always something worse, there is eventually something better. Faith and hope are either good things to spread via your own examples or just an annoying Pollyanna optimism.