Ready to burst

I found my other winter boot, just in time for the first day of spring. It was buried among clothes I'd piled in my basement storage space to donate. I finally began sorting through them last week, hauling giant flexi=black-garbage bag after garbage bag to the back of my car, where they still wait in the second stop of donation purgatory.

Inside the bags are clothes of four sizes, twenty or so pairs of shoes, cheap glass vases, a wireless printer I could never get to work properly and ditched as a $300 loss after months of phone calls and frustration. There's a wine rack that has never held a bottle, and wine bottles I carefully painted and displayed in windows of other apartments. Books I never reviewed. DVDs of pilot TV programs I never watched. Swag from conferences I never found a use for and tote bags -- so many tote bags. 

All of it is from another life, old jobs, past times. It's all stuff that goes beyond not-needing. Each item has become a burden, and I need to clear a path in my basement and head. I need to make room for nothing.

I like seeing the dirty carpet under all of it in my storage space. I welcome the dust and cracked bits of plaster where the piles used to be. 

There's a lot more to haul out in the months ahead. And there's this first full load to get out of the back of my car.

But at least now I can ride to Goodwill with the windows down, letting the dust and past and all that I was holding on to air out on my way.

In all that filth and discarding, I feel the spring indoors. And even on that blue battered carpet, it feels fresh and clean.

Click to read more ...

When time and money are the very same thing

The Not Boyfriend's quick-turnaround weekend visit was abbreviated by flight delays and rain and things we have been frustrated by so often in the time we've been together, warrant only a sad-face by text and waiting and adjusting plans and more waiting.

Instead of arriving at 11 p.m. on Friday, he stepped quietly through the darkness outside into the darker hallway of my apartment at 5:30 Saturday morning. We don't normally sleep in together -- he is ever on baker's hours and I am wanting to make the most of the hours we have in each precious day we're in the same city. But we did on Saturday, letting the morning hours slip by lazily, the light stream in through the windows, and the air conditioning kick off and on while we were wrapped up in a comforter and each other. 

Outside, St. Patrick's Day had already been blaring on block after block of Chicago since hours before his plane was supposed to land at O'Hare. It's a holiday treated like New Year's Eve here, and city-dwellers and tourists either love it or avoid it at all costs. We acknowledged it, but it wasn't until well after we'd had brunch and walked through one of my favorite neighborhoods that I realized I wasn't wearing any green at all. I can't remember the last St. Patrick's Day that happened.

But then I haven't been with the Not Boyfriend on St. Patrick's Day before. The most we joined in as groups of people in oversized leprechaun hats and green beads with shamrocks and blatently open containers crowded the streets was to duck into my favorite bar, sit at one corner and order a few cocktails while the breeze and beer smell and random yelling blew in.

This drink , I thought, is the most green I'm getting.

It is made of celery juice and gin and deliciousness that conjures up all kinds of summer times. 

I drank it as we laughed and made fun of the people on the street and each other. As we dipped into a whispered conversation about how I've not been feeling myself lately, how the roughness of the last months is like a hangover. 

The Not Boyfriend, cradled my hand, palm up, in his, so that together we made layers of an open cup. He turned the talk to money. I've shared some financial details and questions and discussions with him, and we've both made clear how independent we are about salaries and savings and taking care of ourselves in this way. He also knows in this search, in this transition, my savings are dwindling and it has caused me a lot of anxiety.

He told me he loves me, he asked me to let him help me in ways I swore I'd never let a mind get intermingled in my life again. He said he knows I am strong and that letting him help is even stronger.

There were tears over these cocktails. And something shifted just a little bit. 

Is it too cliche to say I feel green about money, especially when details are aired on St. Patrick's Day? I do. I feel like I am at the very beginning of being wise about what I earn. I have spent four years trying to recover from some slow and devastating choices made in my marriage about money, and feeling fiercely that I'd never share that responsibility or security or burden or empowerment with someone again. And here I was having drinks with a man who was telling me he expected me to take a handout, whether I wanted to consider it a gift or a loan or help or not. I just had to be able to see it as strength.

It's all so intimate -- talking openly about what's in your wallet, your money market fund, available on your credit card right now. It may be more difficult to share it with a partner, at least for me, then write it to be imprinted online long after my debts have disappeared and my credit score no longer matters. 

I brushed off his offer a few days earlier, saying it made me too uncomfortable, that I didn't even want go further. But here he was, we were, with open hands.

I'm not sure I will take it. I hope I don't need it. But it's there, the promise to care for each other in this way as well as others, to handle each other's most tender places with love, to remind each other that we are both strong and capable and always in need of a little help.

He put cash on the bamboo bar for the cocktails and a tip for the bartender and this time, I didn't squirm at a man buying me a drink. Our time and our money is precious, and now whatever we have of it was out there in front of us. We just have to choose how to use it and how to offer it. And mostly, how to accept it in the hardest and shortest times, not as frustration or fear, but as a gift, as a strength, as something sweet landing in our open palms.

Click to read more ...

The most important people is me

Standing at the sink, brushing teeth, mouths full of blue bubbles and fluoride, the whir of two off-sync electric toothbrushes humming, both of us so ready to end the day -- this is where a lot happens.

You might not guess that critical conversations, meltdowns, moments of complete peace congregate right there at the sink, but they do. It's the bit of time when everything's getting packed away for the day, sometimes folding up neatly into and "ahh" and sometimes spilling out wrinkly and faded and full of tiredness and holes.

Lil E perches on a plastic step stool so he can see himself in the mirror. I stand just around the granite corner, avoiding spit and reminding to get the gums, the back molars, the inside of the cheeks. The night light pulses red to yellow to orange. There's a clank of a stainless steel container filled with flossers. Sometimes we wink or smile or shake our booties at each other while we brush.

Last night, as Lil E tap-tap-tapped his Spiderman toothbrush against the sink to signal the end of it all, I watched him. He has that lanky look about him that tells me he is about to grow or is quietly growing, his face changing once again on the body that seems to only get stretched out every few months. 

"I think you're awesome," I said around the fingers in my own mouth, still flossing my teeth.

He winked at me, slid a comb through his wet hair so his bangs were flattened against his forehead and dangling over eyebrows into his eyes.

"I think you're awesome, too!" He said it brightly, tossing the comb in the drawer, pushing it closed quickly, wiping toothpaste from the corner of his mouth a towel, pushing his step stool aside, all in a flurry. "The two most important people in my life are you and Daddy..."

In the pause, I was about to acknowledge, to say, "GOOD! And you're the most important person to me!" But I didn't get it in on time. 

"...and me, OF COURSE," he finished.

He was out of the bathroom door and nearly in his room when he concluded that way. My head whipped around to see the backside of the little boy I think is so tall, clad in Star Wars jammies with bedhead setting in before his head has even hit the pillow. He was doing a half-skip sort of thing. Next, he'd kick the Legos out of the way, throw the pillows and stuffed animals from his bed and do a dive on to the side where he snuggles in when we read at night.

But before all of that, in the second or two between toothbrushing and book-reading, in the time between affections and skipping away, in the space between his dad and me -- he placed himself, confidently, emphatically.

The most important person to me is me. OF COURSE.

I could ask when we lose that and why, but we all know it comes incrementally with obligations and guilt and relationships and movies and books and love and lust and heartbreak and children and desperation and misguidedness and all kinds of crazy moments our parents cannot shield us from and serve us in other ways and maybe shouldn't ever be controlled. Instead I wonder why it's so hard to get it back once the ME, OF COURSE, once the confidence has slid slowly down the drain. 

I'm exhausted from the time I spend justifying taking a bath or a nap or a birthday trip with my girlfriends to myself, especially when my son is home, even when 95% of that time is completely centered on him when he is home. It doesn't matter to anyone else that I let him watch a show while I get in the tub or insist he read quietly while I nap next to him or arrange for him to have an extra night with his dad -- they are not even asking. So maybe it is time I get a little more OF COURSE back into the equations I'm tallying for me.

And maybe, if life is as simple as we hope, Lil E will see that and get it, or at least remember it years from now when he's debating whether he should take that bike ride along the lake or get on a plane or wander through a Target or forest or library for a few hours on his own. I can't make him preserve all of that emphatic-ness, I can't decide his priorities for him. But I'd really like to help him hold on to that answer in some form for many years, through all those inevitable experiences, as much as possible. 

Not because he deserves it, but because he owns it. Just like I do. Maybe not in all-caps all the time, but deep in there when we least expect it, most need it, in the everyday or end-of-day craziness and calm. It's there. Still very there. We just both have to tap-tap-tap into it. Of course.

Click to read more ...