Confessions of a Mediocre Widow

by Catherine Tidd

  “What are you doing?” she asked.

  And although I had started this project on a whim, it suddenly became clear to me why I was doing this.

  Visions of long Colorado winters entered my mind, when the days are short and sunlight is at a premium. Knowing that I’d be stuck in the house with three small children, I needed to make this room my cave. My sanctuary. I wanted something bright and cheerful, comfortable and almost spa-like. I needed a place I could go where, when the kids had turned the rest of the house into something that should be featured on Supernanny, I could shut myself away in this one room.

  I needed a space that was entirely “me,” because the rest of the house was so completely “us.”

  “Making my room my own,” I said, taking the scraper and concentrating on the edge of a seam. “I want to feel good when I walk in here.”

  She leaned against the doorframe, crossed her arms, and said thoughtfully, “Huh. I remember when Miss Kate lost her husband. The first thing she did was redecorate her bedroom.”

  And, for some reason, knowing that this might be a “widow thing” made me feel a little better.

  As I moved forward with my bedroom project, my parents decided to step in and try to get the garage organized. As with most married couples, I had “allowed” my husband to have control over two areas of the house: the basement and the garage. The basement was completely decorated in Pittsburgh Steelers paraphernalia and housed a pool table that he was never in town to play on. And the garage showcased his pack-rat nature, evident in the hundreds of cardboard boxes that he kept around (and had never broken down, therefore taking up the most garage space), old tools, and used car parts that he had “just in case.”

  The garage drove me crazy. But I had learned my lesson about seven years into our marriage that I should never touch the man-land he had created. He was out of town on business, and I finally got frustrated enough to get in there and get rid of some stuff. I found a box that was still taped shut, a box we had actually moved twice and he had never opened. I was positive that if he hadn’t looked at it in five years, he really didn’t need the contents.

  So I threw it away.

  Two days later, he walked into the kitchen and said, “Sweetie? Have you seen that box in the garage that was labeled ‘Dishes’? It had some spare cables in it that I need.”

  So I did what any wife would do.

  I lied.

  “Haven’t seen it,” I said, suddenly intent on scraping a carrot to the size of a toothpick.

  “Huh,” he said, puzzled, as he walked back out to the garage.

  The other reason Brad liked to keep everything was that he grew up without a lot of money, which I think explains all of the boxes. As he used to tell me, “When you grow up with nothing, you save everything. Anything can be used for a project at school or church.”

  Let’s be honest, Brad was a potential hoarder. In addition to holding on to odds and ends that may be needed for a project, he was a tinkerer and loved tasks of any kind. He was endlessly ripping apart radios, computers, and cars just so he could put them back together again and watch them work. Sometimes it was like living with a guy from Mythbusters. Our lawnmower had been a garage-sale find that had stopped working for its original owner, who had gotten frustrated and immediately bought a new one. Using a salvaged part and a little bit of elbow grease, Brad had that lawnmower working in about fifteen minutes.

  So because he was what I call a handy hoarder, our garage was filled with not only piles of boxes, parts, and the standard tools everyone else has, but also a buffer, table saw, pipe bender, and large air compressor, none of which I knew how to use.

  My parents spent hours breaking down boxes to throw them away and organizing the tool bench until, when I walked into the garage, I didn’t recognize it.

  “There’s a floor in here!” I exclaimed. “And…surfaces! I had no idea!”

  Little did I know that in a few days, those discarded boxes would completely change how my mother and I interacted with each other.

  We were sitting down at the kitchen table and watching the kids through the French doors as they played in the backyard because they were still seemingly oblivious to the fact that our world had completely fallen apart. I was exhausted for many reasons, one of which was the wallpaper project I had started in my bedroom that still had to be finished.

  “I think I’m going to call a painter,” I said, my eyelids at half-mast, my chin resting in my hands. “I just don’t think I can take on painting that entire room by myself.”

  “Did you finish with the wallpaper?” my mom asked.

  “Almost,” I said. “I need to do the bathroom, but I have to box up the stuff that’s on the counter in there.”

  And then I said something that I would come to regret, even years later.

  “Isn’t it funny,” I said, “how I need a box to put all of my bathroom stuff in, and now I don’t have any?”

  Meaning it as a joke, and actually thinking that Brad was probably laughing at me from the Great Beyond for getting rid of all of his precious boxes, my mother completely missed the irony in my voice (or maybe I was too tired to have any) and thought I was bitching about the fact that they had “overstepped.”

  “You told us to get rid of those boxes!” she cried, standing up from her chair, her eyes blazing behind her wire-rimmed glasses. “I asked you, and you told us to do it!”

  How upset she had suddenly gotten threw me for a loop. Since my mother is not one to pounce on me for any reason, I initially thought she was kidding. And since I was just joking around, I could not figure out why she was reacting this way. But one thing I knew for sure: I was in no mood to deal with it.

  “I did ask you to get rid of the boxes,” I said, immediately shifting from exhausted to completely irritated. “What’s the problem? I was just making a joke!”

  “No you weren’t! You think we did the wrong thing! You think that we did something you didn’t want us to do. I can’t do anything right with you!”

  “I can’t do anything right with you, either!” I fired back. “I can’t say anything right to anyone! I have to watch everything I say now. Don’t you understand? I’ve lost the person I can be the most honest with! He’s gone and I have no one else. He was the one I could tell everything to. He was the one I could fight with and still know that everything would be okay. He was the one I could be completely honest with because he was the one who knew me…the real me!”

  I don’t know why all of that occurred to me in that moment. In fact, I don’t even remember thinking it before I said it. But the second those words were out of my mouth, I crumpled back into my breakfast-room chair in a big lump.

  And then I said something that inflicted instant hurt on my mother.

  “It’s time for you to move back to your own house. I need to be alone.”

  She gave me one hard, weepy look and left the room. I could hear the sounds of packing going on in the basement guest room as she threw all of her stuff together. I watched as she walked up the stairs with her bags, walked down the hall, and walked right out the front door without saying a word to me.

  It’s hard to realize this when you’re in the heat of battle, but we tend to lash out at the people closest to us when life hands us something we can’t handle. To everyone on the outside, I looked like I was behaving normally and progressing with life because that’s what I let them see. I couldn’t afford to show my emotional hand to just anyone because then I ran the risk of them saying, “That woman is crazy and I’m better off without her.”

  That fight over nothing important had allowed me to let go, get angry, and finally yell at someone, someone safe, because deep down I knew that I would never lose my mother. I knew that her love would force her to come back and never abandon me. And I think there was a part of her that felt the same way. She was scared and confused and didn�
��t know her place in my life anymore, just as I didn’t know my place in my own life. I was irritated that she got mad over something so trivial when, in those weeks right after Brad’s death, I felt like I had earned a pass on anyone getting upset with me. It didn’t occur to me that I might have been her someone safe. That she was letting her emotions go because she knew that in the end we would be okay.

  But in that moment, I was scared. Everything had changed, and the life and everything else I had counted on were no longer a sure thing. And that day, when my mother walked out the door, I was terrified that by finally letting go and showing someone my true self, I had just had my first relationship casualty.

  Thanks to a heaping serving of grief, with a side of cardboard.

  10

  In hindsight, I really should have seen it coming. I mean, you put even the closest of relationships together physically and combine that with an extremely emotional situation, and someone is bound to erupt.

  One just has to hope that the eruption is the size of a small science project, and not Mount Vesuvius.

  I’ve learned so many things since then about why the cardboard incident happened. Years later, we tried talking about it, attempting to figure out what exactly went wrong.

  “We were…we were…” my mom tried to verbalize.

  “We were both nuts,” I said succinctly and she instantly agreed.

  For me, it was the simple fact that I didn’t know what to do with myself. Everything was so raw and right at the surface. There was no buffer from the outside influences that seemed determined to bring me to my knees.

  In my mom’s case, it was the simple fact that she was dealing with what I call “the triple whammy.”

  My mother was tired. Emotionally and physically, she had been worn down until there was almost nothing left. Not only was she dealing with the fact that she had lost a son-in-law that she loved, but she was also watching her own child reel from the loss and worrying about how her grandchildren would fare, as well. And I could understand that since I was working on my own personal double whammy of missing my husband and worrying about my children. Working to do her best to take care of all of us, while trying to sort through her own grief and confusion about why this had happened, had my mother feeling like the rest of us—at the edge of jumping off an emotional cliff.

  • • •

  “Where’s Nana?” Haley asked as she breezed in through the back door on the way to her room the day that my mom left.

  “She had to go home,” I said, worried that Haley would feel suddenly abandoned by the one sane adult she had living in the house.

  “Oh. Okay!” And off she went.

  Nana had to go home? I looked around at my empty breakfast room until my eyes settled on the scene in the backyard of Sarah and Michael trying to get their chubby little legs to cooperate and climb the huge pine tree next to the porch.

  Oh God. They’re all my responsibility.

  The house suddenly seemed huge and made me feel lost. My bedroom was a wreck. The whole house was a wreck. I looked at the pile of bills on the counter and knew that someone would have to take care of them. Me. The lawn outside looked like it was growing right before my eyes, and I realized that I didn’t know how to mow. The stove seemed to mock me from the corner as if it were saying, “You idiot. Now that you’ve kicked her out, you’re going to have to learn how to use me again.”

  What in the hell have I done?

  I was all alone, which, for some reason, reminded me of when each of the kids was born. At the time, my parents were still living in Louisiana and my mother would always fly in a few days before the due date of each one of the kids and stay for a few weeks after. She would get up with me in the middle of the night, allow me to take some breaks to go on walks, and generally just be there when I needed a shoulder for a good hormonal cry.

  But then it would be time for her to go back home, and every time that day came, I felt afraid and unsure if I had it in me to deal with everything on my own. And it usually took a little while, but eventually the routine would come and everything would seem like it had always been that way. And, I had Brad then.

  When she left that day, I finally had to take the deep breath that had been catching in my throat for weeks. It was all up to me now. Toddlers won’t leave you alone just because your world has come to an end. Dirty diapers still happen; bedtimes need to be recognized; and eventually they all want to eat. So I needed to go to the grocery store or at least look up the phone number for a Pizza Hut.

  And life would have to go on.

  • • •

  I’ve often wondered how Brad would have handled it all if I was the one who died and he was left to take care of things. To begin with, he would have had a heck of a time finding any sort of paperwork upon my demise because I did all of the filing. When I think back, I could have totally taken him to the cleaners and had a very healthy online poker problem, and he would have been none the wiser until I was six feet under.

  I know for a fact that he didn’t know where the life-insurance paperwork was (because I wasn’t sure I even knew and I’m the one who filed it). Unfortunately, if he couldn’t find that paperwork, he wouldn’t have been able to locate his passport (which was filed with it) so he wouldn’t have even had the option of skipping the country once things got hard.

  I’m not saying I would ever have done that. But at least I knew the option was there.

  To be honest, I don’t even know if he knew how to get into our bank account. He could have been out there panhandling with a sign that said, “I have money in an account but I can’t get to it because my wife took the password to the grave. God bless.”

  The sign could have been made from the cardboard that my parents hadn’t gotten rid of because he wouldn’t have let them clean out the garage.

  As with most things, time and distance allowed my mother and me to heal, and although we were cautious around each other for a while, the bond between us eventually returned. We swept it under the emotional rug, which is not something I always recommend, but at a time when everyone was in such distress and it was hard to have a constructive conversation about anything, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

  Eventually our relationship clicked back into place. I would call when I needed a break, and my parents would graciously help me out. I would take the kids over for family dinners, hoping that if I tried hard enough, we would turn back into a family. My life started getting into a routine because with the kids, I really didn’t have a choice.

  And I finally found a box to pack up my bathroom so that I could finish redecorating my bedroom.

  But before the painters could come, I knew I had to do a little housekeeping. A little widow housekeeping. The furniture needed to be rearranged so that I could make the bedroom into the room I had envisioned for myself.

  And that meant moving an armoire into my closet.

  And that meant cleaning some things out.

  And that meant going through something I wasn’t sure I was ready for.

  • • •

  Brad was the most generous person I knew, and I could almost hear him saying, “There is a man out there who might have a job interview or something, but can’t afford to buy new clothes. Give this stuff to someone who needs it.” So, instead of holding on to his things indefinitely, I decided that I should just get it done.

  At that point, when I knew I was going to have a bad day, I would try and compact everything horrible on my to-do list into one twelve-hour period. In other words, if I was going to have a shitty day, I was going to have a really shitty day. And when those days would happen, I would do other shitty things that I had been putting off so that if by chance I came across a good day or at least a day I could successfully get through, I wouldn’t have big, shitty things looming over my head. I would have already finished them on another shitty day.

&nbs
p; I’ll give you an example.

  On a day two months after Brad died, I had to go down to the Air Force Academy for a memorial service for graduates who had died in 2007, so I stopped on the way at the impound lot that held Brad’s motorcycle. Brad’s smashed, broken motorcycle that, even though I knew was not at fault—that Brad was the one who was driving and in control—I secretly blamed for the accident. The motorcycle had been brought to the lot in Castle Rock, just south of my house, after the police and our insurance company were finished with their investigation of the accident. And I had received a letter that said I needed to go to the lot and sign paperwork to release it for demolition.

  I walked into the impound office all dressed up for the memorial service that was about to take place in Colorado Springs and was greeted by two cheerful women in their thirties. I handed them my paperwork and said, “I’m here to pay this bill and release this motorcycle for demolition.”

  “Okay!” said the brunette, as the blond peered over her shoulder and looked at the sheet I’d just handed her. “Let me take a look at this.”

  “That’ll be $250 for the demolition and the time we’ve stored it,” she said. “Do you want to go out there and make sure that everything you need is out of it?”

  The blond nudged the brunette hard. They made eye contact and the blond ever-so-slightly shook her head.

  And I knew that she knew what had happened.

  I cleared my throat and tried to ignore the familiar prickling behind my eyes that meant a meltdown was imminent.

  “No, thank you. Here’s my credit card.”

  I cried all the way to the Springs, but I knew that I had done the right thing. Thank God I hadn’t saved that task for a day that had the potential to be good. Getting closure on the motorcycle was hard, and I had been dreading the Academy memorial service since the day I had received the invitation, so it made sense to just get them both over with on the same day. So, I let myself cry and fixed the makeup on my face with my emergency “cry it all out” kit after I pulled up to the Academy. I took a deep breath, stepped out of my car, and made my way to the clear glass doors of the building.