mind body mama: the eternal present

In the story I tell myself about my time with Sweetiebabyhoneylicious our relationship takes place in an eternal present. The time of our coming together is just a moment before this moment, and we are endowed with as much wisdom and experience as we tumble into love as we have this day. All that came before Sweetie is mere juvenilia. Our era is my real and grown up life.

Except than an era is much longer than a moment. Last weekend, our era hit the major milestone of fifteen years. And lately I’ve begun to realize that the demarcation between juvenilia and maturity is not all that firm: I was only five years out of college when Sweetie swept me up. Though I was eager to put the stupidity of my twenties behind me I couldn’t yet imagine the terrors and triumphs and losses of the next decade and a half. I could not conceive the many ways I might be humbled by this precious, vicious life.

All that humbling – every passion and every mistake, every tragedy and every joy—has been in the presence of my Sweetiebabyhoneylicious. For fifteen years we have been one another’s mirror and witness. We have each been party to the other’s whole grown up life.

That’s maybe what you don’t realize when you are falling into the electric charge of someone else’s skin and scent and history, when you are making out at the Art Bar and thrilling to a voice on the phone, when you are sending flowers and starting to sleep over. Or maybe you do realize it, on some heart pumping level. Maybe that’s why the hands around your waist, the softest cheek, the sudden, unbearable kiss is so exciting. Because where it could lead is so much further and deeper than a silly little twit in her twenties could even know to hope.

When Pop Pop died, Sweetie and I had just moved to The County Seat. It was raining hard the day we got the news and we drove down the following day for the funeral. Gramma Dottie sat at the front of the room wringing her hands and weeping. “That was my whole life,” she whispered, astonished and empty.

I was too young, our love still too new, to know what Dottie meant in her abject grief. Today I am beginning to know what it means to have lived with a love so long that my life is not separate from our life. Today I start to see the path I took when I said yes, I will love you, all those years ago. Today I hear the old love song and know the full weight of what is offered, what will be borne, and the irresistible blessing and burden of such romance:

Take my hand
Take my whole life too
'Cause I can't help
Falling in love
with you.

mind body mama: a few things I know

“The worst thing that ever happened to you,” says Katy Mattingly, standing in front of her Power Point presentation in some very nice shoes, “is the worst thing that ever happened to you.”

Her voice is sad and tender and astonished. Her compassion is palpable, as if she holds the hurts of the room in the palm of her hand, light and unbearably heavy at the same moment. She is addressing the National Women’s Martial Arts Federation Certified Self Defense instructors, talking about trauma and our need to deal with our own shit.

It puts me in mind of the Audre Lorde quote: “There is no hierarchy of oppressions.” Every hurt hurts, and the absence of any particularly heinous violation or loss in one’s own life doesn’t mitigate the violations or losses you have suffered. The worst thing that ever happened to you is the worst thing that ever happened to you.

Just before this Katy said, “If you’ve never been traumatized, I’d like to meet you after the talk.”

I’ve been hip to the limits of this mortal coil for a long time; known, as Maxine Kumin put it, that “our ground time here will be brief.” But it isn’t until recently that I’ve seen the shadow side of this mortality: the fact that, so long as we are here, we are living unrelenting loss.

So long as we are here we are living loss.

As we walk by the river, Birth Pie shares the first observation of a self-help tome she’s reading. It tells her: “You will be grieving.”

“Oh for the love of God!” I explode, largely echoing BirthPie’s own response. “That again! Why don’t we just make it into bumper stickers?”

It seems the long years of our adult lives have been one great loss after another. Have been the story of learning how to grieve.

On September 11, 2001 I got one email through to the Nectarine before all communication to Manhattan died. “I’m OK,” she wrote. “Just saw a plane fly into the second tower.”

When I finally heard her voice weeks later I told her she’d been traumatized by that vision.

“No!” she exclaimed. Her denial scorched . She stumbled on her words. “I…they…I’m here. I’m fine. No. No.”

“That’s survivor guilt,” I wanted to tell her, but I shut up. Because I wasn’t even there with the dust in my skin, the posters of the missing, the terrible silence and sadness and the unspeakable grief that drove New Yorkers to meet one another’s eyes in disbelief and desperation. That was my survivor guilt, denying my right to opinion or grief because I had left the City. I wasn’t there to walk across the Brooklyn Bridge in Chinatown flip-flops, not stuck in islands of traffic sharing cars with strangers to flee to Connecticut. I left the tribe before the greatest tragedy of our time and found few witnesses to my grief and longing for the city I loved. By some miracle I didn’t lose anyone: the Nectarine was fine, the School of Come the Revolution intact.

Checking in at the Y the other day a stranger gave his birthdate as 9/11, some other year than mine.

“That’s my birthday too,” I said.

“It used to be a great birthday,” he said in terrible understanding.

Like the Nectarine, I want to think myself unscathed by the terror. Maybe all I lost was my birthday. But ten years later I hear Oprah Winfrey say, “I still think about them every day.” I remember that every minute I live in a culture traumatized by that great loss. As well as every other loss we each endure, alone and together.

Because so long as we are here we are living loss. Because the worst thing that ever happened to you is the worst thing that ever happened to you. Because you will be grieving.