protection from cynicism

I rub my finger callouses along the table.

These old fingers peck and strum and emote. I always sing, even though I am a terrible singer. Gilda Radnor took singing lessons in the last year of her life, after she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. She always wanted to sing and so she went to a teacher. She didn't do it for a role, or to sing for anyone. Just for herself. Some weeks, I sit and fantasize about that. Would singing be my wholly selfish indulgence? How self-conscious I have always been about my voice, but how deeply satisfying it is to sing loudly. And in the end, I think I sound fine when I'm alone and no one is listening. It is an ego koan.

What is the sound of Angie singing alone in the forest? Beautiful.

In the time before mirrors and you tube and the eternal quest for self on the internet, did we judge what we looked like? Were we wrinkled and hated it? Were we too fat? I look at myself without mirrors and feel beautiful, fine, goddess-like some mornings, then I have a conversation with an angry someone about fat people, and realize how susceptible I am to the mirror of other people's words. Frankly, I'm embarrassed about that too.

I took my guitar with me to my mother's and unself-consciously sang songs with my daughter, or alone. It felt delicious. My family was emotionally tender and my daughter and I made the room cry. Even I cried. Grief singing. I couldn't go on. It had been ten years since my mother heard me play and sing. Back when I could only play Doll Parts then Jane Says on an unplugged electric guitar, and I whispered the lyrics, if I sang them at all. I admit now my punk rock roots have morphed into songs by Joni Mitchell, Tracy Chapman, Leonard Cohen, Stones, the Velvet Underground. 

These rough fingers run down my husband's cheek and he smiles. 

I love when you play guitar.

You do?

Yes. It feels like home.

My soul callouses are worn down, softened. It makes hurts more hurt-y, but it is for the best. I'm not going to work on those cynical chords that recreates the hardness I wore proudly. Sam comes out of left field right after the dude and the conversation about fat people, just when I am feeling shitty and isolated, and says something amazing. He kisses me and tells me that I am gorgeous. Then he asks me if I feel lucky that I am not married to that man.

Oh, you are a mean old daddy, but I like you.

My husband is growing a beard for me and took next week off. After months of sixty hour weeks, I will scratch his whiskers and sit on his lap and call him our Old Man. I keep singing these songs about heartbreak and none of them are about what I think they are about. They are about something beautiful and hopeful.

We wanted to take a trip during his time off. Iceland, we begged. Then just to drive west. To California. The sequoias that swallow cars. Or into the cold rain forest, bed down on some mossy nook, make a sad fire, and sing songs about how we are each other's sunshine. I guess it is kind of square to talk about Joni Mitchell and making a fire. I don't care anymore. I gave up feel self-conscious about squareness when I turned thirty-eight. It didn't work out. The trip, I mean. Travel and gypsy campers, but the thought was enough. We have bills after all, and Christmas gifts. We have this home we built with its strange long horns and collection of small dead insects.. 

I pull a talisman card and it says, "Protection from cynicism." I need that more than any prayer. Maybe that is the prayer:

Help me release cynicism and cranky irony and sarcasm.

Help me let go of the bitter ennui that is the bedfellow of the eternally cool. 

Let me release the cynicism about where I fit in. 

Help me remember that I fit in here. With the bearded man and his barefoot kids dancing to Joni Mitchell's love songs, the ones that sound exactly like break-up songs.

I bought a horn pitcher at an antique shop. It was for my husband's birthday, but on the day, I didn't give it to him. It seemed a little strange, and besides what will we do with this thing? I put it on my altar, and today I had the strong urge to give it to him. So I did. He told me it was perfect to have in our collection of weird antique things. 

I didn't start out writing about my husband. I read the Shack this week. I cannot tell you how many times it has been recommended to me, the pluralist babylost gypsy. I'm not sure what I think of it, but forgiveness and love and the ideas of judgment were more than appealing. And yet there was this deeply cynical part of me that felt self-conscious reading that book at all. It is the wanting-to-be-cool part of myself. Can I divorce that from what I felt about the book? As I read, that part reared up and wanted to tell the book to Fuck off, and throw it, and listen to music that no one has heard of yet. And so I am still parsing out what I think, but I keep the talisman across my chest.

This week I began meditation paintings other than jizos or about grief. It felt strange and liberating and fulfilling. In that space of letting go of cynicism, it made me feel like I was finally be authentically me. And a year ago, painting angels would have felt like anything but the me I thought I was. I am working on releasing cynicism, and non-forgiveness, but it is a long hard road. I keep singing California, even when not at the guitar, and it makes me miss a place I never loved, and a woman I never looked like.

anniversary

In the early months of our relationship, I used to whisper "I love you" into his deaf ear while he slept. He never stirred. Then one night, I said it before he slept, because I had gotten so used to saying it to him after he fell asleep. We dreamed a life together. Sitting around a campfire seven years ago, drinking beer and talking about children we haven't birthed yet, campers we haven't designed, houses we never bought, travels we hadn't packed for. We talked about religion and lack thereof. We talked about the whys and hows of our traumas and our loves, and our friends and family. He's a big white guy from the South, and I am a short brown girl from the East Coast, and yet we seemed so alike. I get him and he gets me. We didn't talk about how we would weather our relationship if our daughter dies three weeks after one of our parents. Or if one of us drinks too much. Or if our children end up in bed every night for five years. We just promised that we would weather it.

The dew covers my toes, and I walk in the grass with the babies, looking for grapes under the huge umbrella of leaves. The fruit flies scatter. The girl tells me that she misses her Daddy, and I tell her I miss her Daddy too. We spent the first five years of her life with oodles of time as a family. Sam working three days a week most weeks, an overnight and a few ten hour shifts that ended around five. When he was working, I savored those times with the kids. Little pockets of alone. When he was home, I used that time to paint and write and be alone in meditation and, also be together as a family hiking on a random Tuesday morning. When I write or art, he takes the children to the park, or swimming, or they just watch European football together while I work in the studio. Compared to other families, I knew those minutes were luxuries, and yet it never felt enough. Suddenly all that time, which felt so pinched and precious then, seems like huge open swaths of land with wildflowers and the women running like they are in douche commercials. My husband took a second job, and now, there is nothing left but waving in the evening as I leave and he enters, and the children clinging to legs and wailing Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!

We left last weekend in spite of the fingernail sliver of time we have been around the kids as a family. It felt like a big deal to leave. We left for our anniversary, which is today, and stayed in a hotel and watched adult shows like Antique Roadshow and 48 Hours, and kissed and drank coffee at 6pm. We dressed up and went to see Dead Can Dance, and laughed about how everyone but us were dressed like gypsies or pirates, or gypsy pirates. There was a girl wearing antlers and a fur vest, and I whispered, "Hey, Puck, your deer horns are blocking the show."

And he whispered, You are the love of my life.

It was like the first time I heard it. And I teared up. "Even after all this time?" I ask. But what I am really asking is, "Even after our daughter died, and I got sober and behaved badly and cried and friends disliked me and I yelled about stupid things, and got fat? Even after all of that?"

Yes, even after all this time.

I have friends divorcing. I am at that age, I suppose, where friends have spent decades together and grow apart. And I think that it is natural to grow apart. I am amazed when people are together for decades and years and diamond anniversaries. Not because I don't strive for that, but I think people are hard to live with. I snap at him about his socks in the middle of the floor and why must he be so grumpy at me when I take a phone call from someone in need. I am a drunk and he abides the demands of recovery. And we had such terrible times of disconnect after Lucia died, when my friends seemed so distant, and I couldn't bear the heartbreak anymore. I couldn't bear to be close and disappointed so I didn't even let him close either. I just wanted to die then. I felt so alone, so alien, so diseased and wrong and wronged. I wouldn't make eye contact with him because I was so angry. I couldn't. He didn't grieve her the way I grieved her. He didn't have to grow babies inside him and have his bladder leak and gain weight and have people ask him if he is pregnant when he is not. And I hated how I grieved, so visceral, so emotive, so feminine, so drunk and angry and none of it felt like the life we were supposed to live. I hated who I had become. Our baby died, and I couldn't get over it. Not only that, I never wanted to get over it. It seemed the differences between us were suddenly monumental, even though we used to seem so alike. How could that be? It seemed impossible to be able to keep a marriage going after her death. How would we, really? How does anyone stay married? This grieving business is a solitary affair. No roses. No space within us that radiates love. It is just dark and endlessly solitary. It is the abyss and you never quite come back. It feels a little bit like hell.

And then, it changed again, our marriage. Counseling changed it. Sobriety changed it. I changed. And joy crept in, and so did he again. And now it feels new again with that ancient knowledge of each other and the darkness we now share. He claims he never felt helpless about our marriage, or scared for it, but I did. I feared everything. My first sponsor used to say that what we fear we become. And I feared becoming a monster.

For years now it is better. I don't take it for granted because of the years when our marriage was so hard. I don't say it much, because it is easy now. He is the easiest part of my life, even when it is hard. He is the person that strengthens me and makes me laugh and asks me to look at how I am integrating my philosophies into my real daily living. Really living. Not the explanation of living that I do here.

We have been married six years now, and we have three children and a hope that we miss all the same. We lost a parent, two grandparents and we built a sanctuary here. Our house smells like incense and campfires. We fill every pocket of it with sacred objects--fossils and found objects from our life together. In the morning, we wake and he says, "Good morning, my gorgeous wife." And I say, "Hello, handsome." And we change a diaper, kiss and boo boo, and thank God for each other.