At 4 a.m. or so I fell into a fitful sleep, the smell of the smoke in my hair finding me even in my dreams. The next morning, the sun sparkled in the true-blue sky and it was a glorious day, but I was engulfed in a black cloud, a knot in my throat so big I could barely swallow around it. While Zack played with Rachel under Rose’s watchful eye, I kept making laps to the house, waiting for the owner to come in from Manhattan. The back end of the house was scorched and black, and that heavy, wet, smoky smell that had been with me in my dreams emanated from the open wound where the sunroom had been. The fire-resistant building materials had done what they were supposed to do and the damage was remarkably contained, but somehow that didn’t feel right. In my head the house had burned to the ground, and my sense of resilience and optimism along with it.
That afternoon, Zack and I got in my car and made the long drive home from Amagansett. When we arrived with our bags of clothes that smelled of the fire, we went right to bed. And that night, the fire alarm in our house went off, screaming in the middle of the night when its battery died. I ran down the hall and pulled at the alarm until it dropped to the floor and the plastic case shattered, as Zack cried in his crib. After consoling Zack and getting him back to sleep, I sat in the middle of the living room with all the lights blazing, trying to get the part of my brain that was loose and panicked and flapping around inside my skull to calm down. I could feel my grip on the notion that life would be okay again someday loosening, that hopeful notion starting to slip through my fingers like the fine sand that lined the roads at the Dunes. I had once thought I deserved a nice and happy life, and I had believed that I would have it. Now I did not know what I believed anymore.
I went back to work the next morning, and I could barely look my team in the eye. I felt so small and scared. When I did look at them, the sadness and concern I saw in their faces made me even more frightened, as if they could see that I was floating away from them on a dark sea. I don’t know how I could feel so alone with that many people who cared about me all around me, but I felt unreachable, as if I were standing at the bottom of a long, narrow well, faces peering at me from the light, many miles away.
But my friends did find ways to reach me. Like the way Kim had cooked up an escape into a day of fun for me and Zack when Chris moved out. Like Marnie clutching my hand in the back of the car and crying with me as we raced Zack to the second ER. And Rose the day after the fire, standing by my side, stiff and on guard like a Doberman, while the owner of the beach house talked with me about insurance and liabilities. Or Kim and Alison and Melanie at the office, letting me try to talk out everything I was learning and feeling every day, our conversations about love and marriage and divorce and heartbreak seamlessly moving from the magazine articles to our own lives and back.
And there was the comfort that came to me one night, a few days after the fire when my friend Nancy called from Atlanta. I answered, just barely, since I’d been crying, and she listened to me wail and said only “I’m sorry”—said it again and again for twenty minutes and didn’t try to offer any advice.
My sister-in-law Melissa, who sent me cards that said “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade” and other simple messages, the inside filled with her love and exclamation points.
My parents, who carefully refrained from asking me questions or telling me how to feel, but lent me money again and again, and then drove up to New York for weekends of patching and painting, and then patching and painting again all the spots where the roof had been leaking. (Engineer fathers may not excel at surprise babysitting duties, but give them a falling-down house and just wind them up and watch them go!)
My brother Scott and his wife, Kelly, who drove up with my parents, and helped to strip and powerwash the deck (which had been shellacked for a temporary sheen, but was now peeling off in long, ugly strips). And then stayed to enjoy my son with me, then listened for hours as I talked at them, trying to explain how I was beginning to make sense of things.
My friends Tracy and Eric, who gave up a gorgeous spring Saturday to help me with yardwork. It took us hours to beat back the grapevines, which were now growing out of control; we filled six garbage bags with their monstrous tendrils.
The surprise birthday luncheon that Alison, Melanie, Kim, and Tracy planned, taking me out for a fancy French meal and giving me a gift certificate for an unreasonably gorgeous (and unreasonably expensive) bisque candlestick I’d loved and coveted for years, to bless the new apartment Zack and I were getting ready to move into, at last.
In being gentle and loving with me, my friends were teaching me how to be gentle and loving with myself, coaxing me to find some self-compassion. It was hard for me to let go of punishing myself for having failed at something important in life, but in my friends’ eyes I would occasionally catch a glimpse of myself, the person I used to think I was—loving and loyal, generous and outspoken, not the selfish and self-centered person Chris had had to escape—the person I might still be.
Through my friends, I was starting to see that my life history hadn’t been entrusted solely to Chris. I had shared a lot of myself with many, many people. Maybe that meant I didn’t suck. Maybe I deserved the love these people wanted to give me. Maybe I actually did know how to have a relationship, to be connected to someone. In the stability I’d had with some of these friends for decades, I started to let go of the idea that I couldn’t keep love.
My best friend in New York was my best friend from college. I’d known Eric and trusted him like nobody else for “more than half my life,” as we always said to each other.
All my best girlfriends from college were still my best girlfriends, even though sometimes months pass between our phone calls.
I’d made friends with Mary Rose and Alix when we were all assistants together at Mirabella eons ago; Alix was Zack’s godmother, and Mary Rose was a reliable sounding board about work, motherhood, family, life.
I’d been seeing my shrink for ten years, and I’d stayed with her through lots of hard emotional work, instead of shedding her and finding a new therapist and an idea of me I could like more easily.
My best friend from high school and I were still deeply connected, even though he and his wife lived in South Carolina. I remember when he wore Garanimals; he knew me when I had braces. Our children had been born just three months apart.
The same stylist, Thea, had been cutting my hair for twelve years. The same colorist, Bryan, had been coloring my hair for ten; I’d been his first client in New York when he moved here from Australia. I’d followed both Thea and Bryan to seven different salons between them, I liked and trusted them (and their haircuts and -color, too, yes) that much.
I had a friend I had met nearly twenty years before, when she and I were both summer interns for magazines in college. She’d written for every magazine I’d ever worked for, and our sons both had the same name.
I was still in touch with almost all of my former assistants, all of whom had gone on to have rewarding careers of their own. And many of my coworkers from past jobs (like Melanie, like Kim, like Holly and Daisy and Mary Rose and more) had agreed to—had wanted to—work with me again and again.
And other past coworkers said they wished they could work with me again. And I knew that was because I have a reputation for wanting people to love their jobs, and love themselves.
I was a keeper. I both wanted to keep people and wanted to be kept. I was loyal. I could be trusted. I could be loved. I was lovable. I was steadier than it seemed on the surface. I would survive. I was surviving. I was, I was. And my friends are the ones who helped me see that I didn’t have to start totally from scratch. Each one of them had a little piece of me, a fragment that he or she was able to help put into place, as if together they were arranging the fractured bits of a broken doll. In their eyes, I was still in one piece, even though I’d been shattered.
And being able to open myself up to them at my most raw—my friends who I knew would do anything if they could, if only there were s
omething they could do—helped me know that I would get through it all. And the days I felt like I didn’t deserve love, they gave it to me anyway.
7
Your Child Knows More
About Life Than You Do
(Think Small)
After the fire, I became hypervigilant. It was an actual physical sensation between my shoulder blades, as if my body were trying to sprout eyeballs there so I could be more aware and perceptive, and see into the mysteries of the universe. I’ve always been someone who lifts her feet when she drives over train tracks or avoids walking under ladders as a kind of karmic insurance, in case the superstitions turn out to be true, but I’m not one for magical thinking. So I was surprised to keep catching myself ruminating about the symbolism of water and fire and what their powerful presence meant in my life. I was a little spooked by the feeling that there were forces larger than me at play.
Now that summer was officially over and the basement almost fixed, I moved into fast-forward to finally get The Evil House (that’s how I always referred to it, in conversation or in my own head: The Evil House) on the market. It wasn’t in perfect condition yet (the roof still leaked in one or two places during windy storms), but the backyard was in its full summertime glory, the thriving grapevines on the pergola weaving their magic. I’d propped out the rest of the house with inexpensive Ikea pieces, hiding the gaps in the furnishings created when Chris had moved out, to make it look like the perfect Brooklyn family home. There was the reading nook on the third floor where I’d never read a book, the guest room that had never had a guest of mine in it, the basement playroom Zack had never played in. It felt like my life had stalled as soon as we moved in.
Except that life hadn’t stalled for Zack.
When we moved into the house, my son had been only six months old, a baby boy with a haze of white fluff where his hair would eventually appear. I had painted the walls of entire first floor while he supervised from his spot in the blue bouncy seat, kicking his feet to make the toys that hung on the chair dance, and giggling when I sang songs to him from my perch on the ladder. In the ensuing months, as my life started to disassemble itself (lost job, lost husband, lost hope), Zack bloomed and then zoomed, learning to crawl, then pull himself up, then walk. For the first week or two, he walked with his arms held straight up overhead for balance, weaving to and fro until he got the hang of things. He had transitioned to solid foods, and then learned to feed himself bits of strawberries and Cheerios with his chubby hands, and then later, with a spoon. He eventually would amble, stiff-legged, over to the tomato plants I’d mothered in the backyard garden, and he would pluck the baby cherry tomatoes off the vine and stuff his mouth full. He’d figured out that my digital camera captured pictures of him, so I’d had to learn how to take photos on the sly to keep every shot from being of his pink pudgy palm as he reached for the camera to turn it around and look at himself. And he’d started to speak. His favorite expression was “all right,” and he relished it like a hard candy when he said it, rolling it around in his mouth: “Awwwwriiiiight!” His sunny personality unfolded as his hair grew in, his sprouting nimbus of white-blond curls an extension of his irrepressible spirit. He was my little lion, my little Leo, and it was blessedly impossible not to be caught up in his joyful wonder at the world.
When Chris had first said the marriage was over, I was heartbroken for Zack, beside myself with grief that he would lose his family at such an early age and that I hadn’t been able to stop it.
I was also upset because it meant I was going to be tied to Chris for the rest of my life.
I actually had moments where I envied my friends who were divorced with no children; their exes simply disappeared, sometimes into other cities and new marriages, only months after the divorce was final. I knew how much my friends had been hurt by their exes’ instant immersion in shiny, new-and-improved lives without them, but I longed for such a simple ending. Instead, Chris and I were going to have to learn how to spend a lifetime sharing something precious, even after we had failed at sharing our lives.
But in the six months since Chris had moved out of the house, I was slowly coming to realize that in some ways the timing of our split had been a tremendous blessing. Zack had been too young when Chris moved out for us to need to explain anything to him, too young for us to have even considered a traditional custody arrangement, with Zack changing households every few days. It seemed clear to both Chris and me that Zack should have one home, one bedroom, one crib, and a reliable, everyday routine to help him get on with the business of being a toddler. We knew he needed to absorb and learn the world around him without the interruptions and anxieties of constant change. Instead, Chris and I would be the ones to bear the brunt of the discomforts and petty annoyances of accomodating each other in my home, even after Zack and I moved to our new apartment.
This arrangement suited what Chris and I were each struggling with most in our separation. Chris had a roster of anxieties about being able to take care of Zack the “right” way (the way I’d made up on the fly, which he’d been so furious at me for being able to do). So having Zack live in one place meant Chris wouldn’t have to learn my mysterious recipes for Zack’s nutritional mush, wouldn’t have to duplicate the set of bottles, set up a crib in his small apartment, keep up on what size diaper Zack was wearing, manage the nanny’s hours and pay. All of this annoyed me, and I complained about it for a week or two with friends before I realized that it meant I would get what I wanted most. Of course I wanted Chris to be a constant presence in Zack’s life, but I wanted Zack to be with me as much as possible, since like every other working mom I suffer the gentle heartache of being apart from him during the day. I knew I would put up with any amount of personal discomfort to avoid having to spend an entire weekend without my son.
So not much changed in Zack’s routine when Chris packed up and moved away. Zack’s father was still there for him three evenings a week, playing with him on the living room floor, reading him bedtime stories, putting him to bed. Zack’s being so young had bought Chris and me time to figure out what the shape of our new life would be. It also allowed me to gain perspective before I had to tell Zack a story about his father and me. I could help him put all the pieces into place in his head long after they had arranged themselves in mine.
A few weeks after Chris had moved out, I was upstairs with Zack, taking him through the paces of his bedtime ritual: a story, followed by snuggling in the rocking chair, and then into his crib for a good night’s sleep. As I laid him down this night, Zack looked up at me and asked, “Daddy?” I felt my heart catch in my throat. It’s rare to be so aware of one of Life’s Big Moments presenting itself to you, but here it was, right in front of me. I reminded myself that even married parents are not both at home all day and night every day. Then I said the simplest things that I knew were true: “Daddy’s not here right now, sweetie. You’ll see him tomorrow. But he loves you very much.”
I resisted the urge to say more while I leaned over the crib and rubbed Zack’s back, because there wasn’t more to say. Not anything that would have made sense to my nineteen-month-old son. As I stood there in my own silence, I felt that I was suspended in a perfect, still moment of ambiguity.
And then I had a brainstorm. “You know who else loves you? Grandma and Grandpa love you, and Grandma Barb loves you, even though they’re not here right now.” I went on, “Uncle Scott and Aunt Kelly love you, and Kim loves you, and Stephen and Julia, too. . . .” I named everyone in Zack’s universe who cared about him. Who cared about us, and me. I was consoled by the thought that lots and lots of people love your child along with you, no matter how lonely it can feel to be a single parent.
I was finding my footing as a parent, and learning to improvise around the hole in my life in a way that felt good and true. That night I went to bed wrapped in a gentle haze of pride.
Zack took to this new little nighttime ritual instantly. Each evening as I laid him down on the changing table to p
ut on his pajamas, he’d look up at me and say, “Annnnnd . . . ,” coaxing me to start the roll call of all the people in this big wide world who loved him. As he grew older and spoke more, he started filling in the blanks himself; I’d start with one name, and he’d call out the rest of the names that made up the group, whether husband, wife, partner, children, dogs, or the single friend alone. Every night as we did this I was reminded that families come in all shapes and sizes, and that this was the world that Zack was growing up in. It was time for me to stop mourning the loss of the mommy-daddy-baby family unit and realize that what made the three of us a family was up to us—and that Chris and I were in the midst of creating that, together, even though we were apart.
This, to me, was a challenging notion. We were no longer a family and yet we were still going to be a family. These truths did not cancel each other out in the way it seemed they must. I knew that keeping both ideas in my head at the same time, finding that tensile point where they were both true, was my pathway to eventually being able to let go of my grief.
* * *
Zack had other lessons to bring to me. A child’s constant engagement and delight with life as it’s happening This Very Second is a boon for any parent, but it was a magical respite for me. Zack taught me not to will away time—not to close my eyes and hunker down and wait out the months until the house was fixed, the months until the divorce was final, the months until we had a new home. Instead he reminded me every day that I could choose to join him in enjoying life’s simple delights. The hour and a half I got to spend with him in the evening when I got home from work was always my Happy Hour.
Falling Apart in One Piece Page 16