I headed right from this emotional maelstrom into another busy fall season at work, another year gone by, another Redbook Heroes luncheon to produce. We had been able to build on the success and buzz we’d created for the magazine and had attracted a fantastic celebrity lineup including an appearance by Harry Connick Jr. He was the first man we were honoring at this event, chosen in acknowledgment of all the incredible work he’d done in his hometown of New Orleans in the months after the floods caused by Hurricane Katrina.
But before hosting that luncheon I had a wedding to go to in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Holly, my assistant at Marie Claire, and now a writer and editor at Redbook, was marrying her longtime boyfriend, Gabe, and I wanted to be there. The week immediately following the wedding, I was scheduled for back-to-back black-tie events for work, the same week that our nanny would be on her annual two-week vacation home to Turkey. And it was the same week Chris had decided to claim as his own, for a week off from his job and his parenting duties, a week to write and work on his stuff.
When I realized that Chris’s vacation and Sezi’s vacation were going to overlap, I called Chris and asked him if he could change his plans, since he was staying home. The answer was a very brusque no, seething with disdain. Clearly I had pissed him off by asking this, as if I had insinuated that his vacation was unimportant. Once again, I was the selfish, bossy wife, who thought her complicated schedule mattered more; I felt all the terrible things Chris can think about me in the back of my throat like a bad taste. I cursed myself for having even called him to ask. I cursed myself for having any needs at all. If I could just stop needing help, if I could just stop having wants, then I could be safe, and not be vulnerable to the way other people disappoint me and let me down. I felt myself think this thought, and then chastised myself for having it. This was not the way to healing; this was the path to being hard. I desperately longed to go for a run, a half hour on the treadmill usually being enough to clear the voices of fear and self-loathing from my head, but because of my hip injury, I couldn’t even do that.
So instead I invited myself to a half-hour self-pity party, where I listed all the decisions I’d made that had brought hard things into my life: I had married Chris, I had launched a demanding career, I had refused to give up the career to save my marriage, I had refused to give up the career when my marriage was over, I had bought an apartment that was too small for a live-in au pair even though a live-in would have made my life slightly more manageable, I hadn’t spent enough time finding backup babysitters, I hadn’t just gone for a shared custody arrangement, I hadn’t learned to stop being afraid of Chris, I hadn’t learned to expect that bad would almost always go to worse. And so, after having taken the blame for the shape of my life while at the same time realizing that if I hadn’t made those decisions it probably would have changed nothing, I took a deep breath, let it out, and started to make other arrangements.
I picked up the phone and called Gregg and Melissa and asked, straight-out and simply, if they would be able to take Zack for that week. Nothing would be more fun for Zack than to spend a fall week on my brother’s farm; running around with his cousin Anna and getting to see Gregg’s cool tractor; by now Zack had graduated from Thomas the Tank Engine and was fully in thrall to John Deere. Taking Zack there meant I would be adding a two-hour drive down and back to two different days of an already-packed week, but it seemed like the best solution. I almost cried when Melissa said yes.
I hung up and reminded myself that it wasn’t that hard to ask for help. That it didn’t take a piece out of my heart to ask for help. That it didn’t mean I was weak to ask for help.
Before Zack and I left town for Santa Fe, I had to squeeze in another visit to the emergency room with Zack, to get the ER doctors to take a look at his lip and figure out why two of the dissolvable stitches hadn’t dissolved. They stuck out like the pin bones on a piece of salmon, and when I gave one a tug to try to pull it loose, Zack’s lip would tug with it, making my stomach turn over and making him cry. Surely the stitches would eventually disappear, I had been thinking for weeks, swatting away the thoughts that their failure to do so was a sign of universal ill will against me. Finally, I called the ER, hoping to get the name of an ointment that would do the trick. Instead I was asked to bring him back in.
After examining Zack and the stitches, the doctors were visibly befuddled—which was not reassuring. They kept referring to his chart to check the day the stitches had been put in and made scary sounds about how long it had been, confirming for each other that, yes, the stitches most definitely should have dissolved by now. The doctors reached over and pulled on them the way I had. When that failed, they decided to try to pluck the recalcitrant stitches out with tweezers: two doctors and a nurse holding Zack down and clenching his head, Zack screaming in horror because of being restrained, but still managing to thrash his head around. I got up on the table on my knees and stared into Zack’s eyes, telling him that the doctors were trying to help him, but after five minutes of his screaming and flailing the doctors gave up. I left the ER, the stitches that should have disappeared weeks ago still in my son’s lip, and with no further advice from the doctors except that “they really should dissolve eventually.” They were reassuring themselves more than me; in any case, my anxiety was not assuaged.
So, his stitches firmly in place, Zack and I made the long trip to Santa Fe for the wedding. He was a great traveling companion, charmed by the Dallas airport and the cobalt blue monorail cars we got to ride in when we had to change flights there. And in our two-hour drive from the airport, he was amazed by the scrabbly red Southwestern landscape, so different from the green and trees we had at home in Brooklyn; he asked me the name of every piece of brush he could see. He was slowly making that crossover from baby to boy, even though he was still in Pull-Ups. At the rehearsal dinner that night, Zack quickly located the only other child near him in age, exclaiming to this boy he’d never met, “There you are! I’ve been looking for you everywhere!” His confident, outgoing spirit helped make the event an even lovelier occasion, as he pulled me through and to things and people, always with his incredible sense of happiness and joy, my constant reminder that life was good, life was meant to be good.
The next day was the wedding, the first I’d attended since Chris and I had broken up. I worried that being a witness as Holly and Gabe made their beautiful commitment to each other was going to be too much to bear, that I was going to be selfish, and cry for my own loss. Instead I found myself holding my breath, hanging on every word, tears slipping down my cheeks as I craned to see and hear and take in all of it. The poignancy and power of watching these two people stand before a gathering of family and friends to make their vows rang even more clearly to me—the nakedness, the daring, the sheer beauty of it. It was all over both their faces, each of them overcome with emotion at different moments, all of us in the audience in those moments along with them.
The most beautiful weddings aren’t the best-made parties; I smiled to myself as I remembered trying to impart this knowledge to the readers of Modern Bride, drunk as they were with choosing flowers and colors and party favors. The best weddings are those where the bride and groom dare to reveal and affirm to each other the soft places where they meet, and the audience is then able to become a part of the covenant. I remembered so clearly the way that Chris and I had met in those tender places, and had connected there for a long time. I remembered the love that had brought Chris and me together, and the bravery it took for us to stand up and share it so publicly, so joyfully, with a roomful of our family and friends. It had been real, what we shared. And it was still real for me, the memory of it, the history of it, all the ways it had changed me and fed me still visible in who I was today. Sitting there, a weeping guest at Holly and Gabe’s wedding, I felt proud that I had dared to marry, and proud that I was surviving my divorce with a sense of optimism intact. I felt certain, in a way that I hadn’t even when I married Chris, that I truly believed in marriage, and b
elieved especially in the beauty and ritual of publicly declaring your gamble, of daring to hope for the best and chase after it with an open heart, bringing all the guests along for the ride.
After less than forty-eight hours in Santa Fe, Zack and I packed up and started the ten-hour journey back home: it would be one car ride, two planes, an hour stuck in the hell of getting out of a New York City airport, and then, after an hour-long cab ride, home at last. I was supposed to be up-and-at-’em the next morning, driving two hours to Philadelphia and back, so that I could be at my desk by noon or so, if the traffic gods were smiling.
But as we landed at JFK and I turned on my phone, I picked up a voice mail from Gregg: “Stacy, listen, I know this is pretty awful timing, but . . .” One of the dogs he and Melissa had recently adopted was having emergency pulmonary surgery that night. It wasn’t clear how things were going to go, and there was just no way they could take care of Zack for the week. As Zack sat in his stroller, tired and hungry from the long trip, I replayed Gregg’s message twice again to be sure I’d heard him correctly, waiting for the part where he would offer up an alternative plan. Then I put down the phone and just sobbed, grateful for the never-ending hustle in JFK so that I could hide in plain sight as I completely fell to pieces in the baggage claim area. Zack called out, “Mommy? Mommy?” but all I could do was take his hand. I finally calmed down and, wiping my eyes, looked at him and said, “Mommy’s fine. She’s just crying because something didn’t go right, but we’re fine.” I would tell him later about his not getting to go see Anna, Melissa, Gregg, the farm and the tractor, but not now. He looked at me, believing me and not believing me at the same time. I felt my heart break even more. I wanted to protect him from all this. I wanted him to believe we—he—could be safe; it was my sole purpose as a mother to make him safe. But as the two of us sat there in the airport, waiting for our bags and waiting for my answers, I saw clearly that this divorce was going to touch him in ways I couldn’t control.
I didn’t know what to do or what to think or who to call or what to think or what to do or anything anything anything. I couldn’t, absolutely flat-out wouldn’t, call Chris. And I couldn’t call my parents, because although they would probably offer to take Zack, I might not be capable of managing the emotional fallout I would feel if they didn’t.
And so I called Kim, leaving a barely coherent phone message that ended with me in hysterics, apologizing for being such a mess. In the meantime I focused on the words “path of least resistance” and wondered what that was. Kim called me back just as my bag was showing up on the conveyer belt, and we agreed it was this: me, not calling Chris; me, not calling my parents; me, going to work; Zack, going to emergency day care; me, canceling my work-related events. That was the path.
Monday, I managed. I got up, dressed me, dressed Zack, fed him breakfast, fed me breakfast, packed his lunch, put him in a stroller, got on the subway, rode in a jam-packed subway car with the commuters all around me being annoyed by my stroller, got off the subway, and dropped him off in the emergency day care center after getting lost in the confusing hallways of the subway station/shopping center/maze that lies under Rockefeller Center. I had somehow come up from the subway platform on the wrong staircase and couldn’t find the hallway that connected to where the day care center was tucked away, so I ended up carrying Zack in his stroller up two flights of stairs out of the subway, breaking a heavy sweat in the warm fall weather (always a nice experience in work clothes and high heels), and then pushing him two blocks to the center’s street-level entrance. I was wiped out, mentally and physically, when I got to work.
I sat at my desk and tried to dive into the day, but as soon as Kim came into my office, I started crying again.
“How is this possible?” I asked. “How can these things keep happening to me?”
“I know, I know,” she said. “It’s a lot of hard all at once. You really aren’t getting a break.”
Not a single one. My running injury had taken away the one coping device that made life more manageable, and had added a raft of doctor’s appointments—X-rays, MRIs, physical therapy—to my packed schedule. Zack’s stitches from his birthday injury had not yet dissolved, and I still had to find someone who could figure out how to get them out. My divorce lawyer kept disappearing, and no matter how many times I called or e-mailed her, no updates were forthcoming about the state of the separation agreement that Chris and I weren’t even disagreeing about. I had called on my family to help me, and then they couldn’t help me. I was still afraid of my not-quite-ex-husband and the way he seemed to hate me. And I still had to start over on starting over, because here I was almost two years later, still stuck, still falling apart, still floundering, still drowning, goddammit. Still under water.
I managed to make an appointment with a pediatric plastic surgeon on Wednesday morning, to look at Zack’s stitches. The doctor’s office was a short walk from our apartment, but when we woke up on Wednesday, it was pouring: miserable hurricane-rain weather that put me on edge, a vague sense of dread creeping up on me until I caught it and reminded myself I didn’t live in that house anymore and to let the feeling go. So I buckled Zack into his car seat and drove the seven blocks to the doctor’s office and we scooted inside. When we got in to see the doctor, he sat Zack on the examining table, took one quick look at his lip, and said, “Hold still.” He put his hand on Zack’s forehead and gently but quickly guided him down onto the examining table. Before I even saw him reach for the tweezers—One! Two!—the stitches were out and the doctor was pressing a cotton pad against Zack’s lip. Neither Zack nor I had had even a second to see what was coming, and now it was done. I was so relieved—and so angry. Zack had been through hell in the ER a second time, for no reason. This doctor didn’t fuss about why the stitches hadn’t dissolved; he had simply dealt with the fact that the stitches were still there.
It was such an obvious lesson. Try to solve the problem that’s here in front of you. Try to focus on why your life is hard this second and fix that; don’t keep getting all caught up in the reasons that your life became difficult in the first place. Everything isn’t about the divorce and your bad luck. Sometimes rain is just rain.
But as I stepped out of the doctor’s office into the downpour, carrying Zack and a huge umbrella to try to shield us, I couldn’t help but think how everything in my life felt like an allegory. Or a poem. Or some kind of message handed down from the heavens.
When we made it back to our block, there were no parking spots. I drove slowly around the block in every direction once, twice; twenty minutes went by and not a single spot opened up. I double-parked outside our building and sat there trying to figure out what to do. I wasn’t dressed for work, but I could just drive into the city with Zack to take him to emergency day care and wear jeans in the office. But then I would have to find a place to park in Manhattan, and wheel Zack through the streets, carrying his diaper bag and lunch and an umbrella, to drop him off at day care. And I hadn’t made his lunch yet, or packed his diaper bag for the day care center. So maybe I could stay double-parked here, and bring Zack inside and put on a video for him to watch while I got ready for work and made his lunch and got his diaper bag. Or, I could keep driving and looking for a spot, and then have to carry him back home in the rain, because I hadn’t brought the stroller to the doctor’s office. Or, I could go inside and get the stroller, come back to the car, and then find parking. . . .
None of these options was good. I was going to get to work really late and really wet no matter which one I chose. Decide! Decide! Choose the path of least resistance! I couldn’t decide. Every path created problems. I started to feel an anxiety attack setting in, the breathlessness, the pounding heart, the dizziness. I tried to talk myself down, under my breath: “Calm down, stay calm, be calm. Breathe in, breathe out.”
“Mommy?” Zack said plaintively.
I started to cry, for the eighteen-millionth time since Chris left me. Except that this didn’t have anythin
g to do with Chris or the divorce. It was that my sense that life was good—or even just good enough—was slipping away. I was going to fall apart right now, sitting here in my car in this torrential, unforgiving rain, right outside my apartment building, because I could not decide what to do next. I took in one long, ragged breath, reached for the key in the ignition, and turned off the car. I got out in the pouring rain and untangled Zack from his car seat and ran inside with him in my arms, leaving the car parked in the middle of the street, having managed to decide, at least, that, yes, a ticket was the least of my worries.
We were soaked to the skin when we got into the building. As soon as I unlocked the apartment door and opened it, I sank to my knees and cried raggedly, unable to hold myself back from giving over to the feelings. I took off Zack’s jacket and his boots, while he stared at me wide-eyed. Sobbing, I offered him all I had: “I’m sorry, Zack, I’m sorry I’m crying. I just don’t know what else to do. Mommy’s just sad, honey. But we’re safe, we’re fine. I love you.”
Then I lay down on the hallway floor, and I gave up. For the first time in my life, I felt what it was to actually wish I were not alive. I didn’t want to kill myself, I just wanted not to be Not Here Anymore. I wanted to will myself into nonexistence, to disappear in a puff of smoke. This was actually the path of least resistance, as far as I could see. Zack just walked around me, saying, “Mommy? Mommy? Mommy cry?” But I was too far away for him to reach me. And that was the scariest feeling of all.
I did get up off the floor. And take then Zack to day care and go to the office. Yes, I’d hoped that by now I’d be finished with this crushing grief, this continually reappearing astonishment that life could hurt so much and that I could be so unprotected. But in that state of utter resignation, lying on the floor of my front hallway, I’d heard the truth I needed to know: I didn’t want to be dead. I wanted to be here. I wanted to live this, even when this didn’t feel so good.
Falling Apart in One Piece Page 22