The Grief Pygmies

When your Dad dies, things happen like stabs out of nowhere. Like blowdarts through the window from little invisible pygmies. It happened to me this morning, and instead of cleaning the kitchen, I have decided to write about it in search for more clarity, more understanding of what this thing grief, this thing death, is.

A few years ago, at the family reunion right after my Dad died, John, Dad's cousin, sat me down and beautifully recounted some of his best memories of Dad. He ended saying, "when someone we love goes beyond this life, we keep reaching, beyond the grave for that relationship, for that person, and though they are dead, that relationship still grows with each new understanding of who they are."

Today, I was pulling Harper's tights up over her sweet little booty, and reached down to straighten that pesky toe seam that always ends up vertical instead of horizontal, and WHAM. It happened. I nearly missed that imp, that pygmy with the blowdart. He hit me right where it counts and the crack in my everyday armor split wide open. Of course I didn't recognize it for what it was at first. I just stormed around the house mad at everything and Seth in particular for all those dumb things you get mad at when you are deflecting your pain. But for some reason, straightening that vertical seam on Harper's tiny foot kept coming back to me, frozen in time. And I realized that I was Harper and my Dad was me 33 years ago, and he was straightening my tights so that the seam went horizontally over my toes. I was in his lap and he was concernedly and anally perfecting my two-year-old hosiery.

And I am undone.

Damn you, grief pygmies.

When my Dad died three years ago, he hadn't been a part of my everyday life for several years. Sure, we talked on the phone a few times a month, and I flew out to see him a few times a year, but his presence was psychological, not physical, for the most part, and I was fine with that. It took me at least a month to cry after the funeral, and the grief process seemed to be in slow motion. But every time I get hit with one of these moments, these stabs out of oblivion, I am thrown into accelerated grief, and feel sort of guilty: "What is wrong with me? Why am I feeling all of this emotion? It's been three years, aren't we finished with this?"

I guess all I can see through this is that when your Dad dies, the unravelling, the understanding, the weight of his influence, his role, his personhood is far too much for anyone to work through. Even in a lifetime.

A dear friend of mine says that to love someone is to understand them. Love and understanding are interchangeable. There were huge swaths of misunderstanding and unknowing in my earthly relationship with my Dad. This reaching out beyond the grave, this yearning for understanding of my Dad is love. And I can imagine him now, on the other side, now in the arms of Perfect Love, now reaching back, now understanding.

Things we don't particularly like

Today was the grand packing day. "Aljo," our trailer, borrowed from some dear friends, is a 1958-ish 10 foot aluminum camper, and also our home for the next 6 weeks, give or take. We are headed East to "une grand fete" - Nathan Johnson and Katie Chastain's wedding. It's going to be a 5-day affair, if we can make it for the Van Gaylen show on Wednesday night! We are super excited to see our old friends, but I am definitely NOT super excited about this final push to get out the door.

The house is a wreck, the final packing details: "where should we put the childrens' books?" and "should we take the Brazilian hammock or the REI hammock," and "I know I saw my sun hat just the other day, where the &$*! is it now?" I think the final 10% of all packing sometimes takes the longest.

My friend Cindy compared our situation to giving birth, and in some ways I agree. The last few days of pregnancy are just sheer hell. Then you have a baby and BAM! You are immediately shot into a brand new phase of life.

In a few short hours BAM! we will be launched into the first experimental phase of gypsy-dom.

On a different note, Fender's been testy with Harper lately. Tonight, while I was tucking him in bed he says, "I don't wike Harper anymore."

Me: "oh? why not?"

Fen: "sssee aways messing fings up."

Me: "ya, little babies tend to do that when they start walking..."

Fen: (with the beginning of an impish grin) "Maybe we ssould sell her"

I think we all could use a nice 30 hour road trip...

Starting Over

Seth got "let go" six and a half weeks ago. It was one of those ugly incidents full of bewilderment and betrayal that ends up feeling like someone took a blow torch to one of your appendages. An arm, a foot. When he told me I was driving, leaving a long day of killing time at the mall behind me. I was good at that whole how-to-fill-a-day-with-enough-to-help-you-forget-your-loneliness thing. I guess you could say his job was prestigious, important. Not in a white-collar sense, but he worked for important people, and was on the road to his dream. And as a result, I spent a large part of this last year as a single, albeit, married mother of two.

It was a slow descent, that loneliness. Like a long dreamy Southern Belle descending a spiral staircase on a torpid Georgia afternoon. It was full of valor and idealism. I was such a good wife, so committed to my husband's dream that I thought the emptiness almost charming. I had found so many creative ways to entertain the kids that my life felt like one long succession of play dates and trips to the zoo.

So, when he got fired, I felt like I had gotten fired too. And I was mad. Mad at his employers, mad at the company, mad at the industry, and mad at his employers again. My sense of outrage was heroic, fueled by my loss of identity and that ugly feeling of being victimized, of being scorned.

But immediately Seth and I were a team again, and that felt amazing. My typically non communicative husband had suddenly begun to talk to me constantly about how he was feeling, and I was over the moon! Conversations would just start up at all times of the day and night. Most of them revolved around his ex-job, but some were the beginnings of forward thinking for our family. And suddenly, in the midst of this great tragedy, I started to feel alive again, for the first time in a year.

Which means I was dying before and hadn't realized it.

I guess I had been like the toads my mom always warned me about.

"Don't you be like those toads, " she'd say, and I would roll my eyes.

"You put them in a pot of cold water, put the pot on the stove and then wait while the water heats

up. Those frogs don't know they're in hot water until it's too late 'cause they're cold blooded and

their bodies just adjust to the heat 'till they die!"

I think secretly she's always wanted to try to actually boil a frog, she's just that curious.

But, Mom, you have a point.

I guess I believed so blindly in my life that I thought loneliness, emptiness and lackluster were just par for the course, and as the water "heated up" I absorbed it, thinking I was somehow being righteous or a good wife. Yeah, good and miserable.

Blech. I want to scratch and re-write. I want to crumple that sorry acceptance of mediocrity, of a life of chosen unhappiness, of voluntary aloneness and toss it baseball style into the deepest darkest trash bin I can think of. To think that I was beginning to sacrifice my own soul for the comforts of steady income, a husband with a high-profile job, and *maintaining* said comforts!

We are leaving this town for a while to go re-write our story. Our dream right now is to buy an old bus that's been converted to an RV that runs on Waste Vegetable Oil (WVO) and drive it across the country to a few weddings, a family reunion, and some good old-fashioned family vacation time. We leave Monday, actually, and, um, honestly, we still do not own a vehicle that will transport our family across the country. I have said many times that I feel like Noah, only for me, the flood has already occurred, I'm just herding and packing and praying like crazy that the boat is going to appear!

And, dude, I know that I sound utterly insane.

Stay tuned for more news. I promise I will blog more.

So Seth and I just spent loads of time trying to upload the new song, "The Scent of Honeysuckle" to no avail. I am seriously considering switching my blog to Tumblr...it's so much easier, I hear? Anyhow, the song is a rough draft recording we did 2 nights ago. I'm not too concerned about perfectionism at this point, just keeping momentum going. I like this new momentum.

So, I have a piano lesson scheduled for Wednesday night at Dr. G's house, but I haven't even looked at Prokofiev for over a week and I am tempted to cancel. Bail. Ditch. Always my temptation. Just writing this down and confessing my sins to the unknown vastness of cyberspace (not that my reader base is vast - but you get the point) is serving as the ass-whooping I need to get myself to that black shiny thing with white buttons 4 feet away from me as I type.

Seth is doing dishes, the saint, and again, the dishwasher is running. And, oh, it was a lovely Mother's Day. Maybe I'll write about that later.

good ol' regular

It's Wednesday night. I'm overfull from dinner - breakfast for dinner, to be exact. Seth made old fashioned waffles topped off with blackberries, I made a chorizo-sweetpotato-greenchili-corn-onion hash. It was damn nice. Now we are both on our respective computers clicking away with the dishwasher in the background. It's cozy. It's home.

I wrote a new song last week, or maybe it was the week before. I can't keep track of the weeks. Seth says this song is the home to my best lyrics yet. I can't help but be, in the vein of Marilla Cuthbert, "real proud" of it. I can't stop playing it. I've now played it for two of my best friends here and I just want to keep playing it for anyone who will listen. Last night, I almost asked my little preschool music class if they wanted to hear it. I'm shameless.

It, my new little ditty, is called "the scent of honeysuckle". At least for now.

It's not a happy song, but it's not a sad song, unless you know that I wrote the second verse while I was at my Dad's deathbed. What a funny thing, a deathbed. A bed on which you know you are going to die. Deathbed.

These subjects keep coming back to me. I'm ok with that.