Soon there will be no more grief
Wretched week that started with me enforcing the unwinding with N and then culminated with S and I plunging the depths of our marriage and what went wrong and could we get it back? all the way to Wednesday when S came across all of my correspondence with N and unfortunately read it. And let me count the days of tears – no I’m not sitting on the stairs anymore crying, which is what I did for so long I couldn’t bear it, but now I’m wailing in hotel rooms, airplanes, terminals, hospital rooms – you name the place – I’ll cry there.
Before I left for SF, N and I were walking the dogs around the bayou and stopped to read a missing person sign. While I was gone N found out the guy drowned in the bayou – possible suicide. I get her missive in SF when I’m walking along the Embarcadero and all I can think of is C, the architect I had a crush on at BAR, who rode his motorcycle to the Golden Gate and jumped off because his girlfriend had broken up with him. Then I hear foghorns and remember laying in bed and looking at the Marin Headlands, and I see fog and recall a time when I walked right up to the Golden Gate bridge and still couldn’t see it, the fog was so thick, then I hear sea lions and remember Sam barking at them. I’m thinking about it all – SF, the crushing feeling that it robbed me of things I wanted, and I sit down at a cafe to smoke a cig and have an espresso and a woman pushes a stroller right up to where I am, stops and two other women come up behind her and they are all looking in the stroller – so I get up and peer in and there is a little girl, curly red hair, laughing and wiggling. And I’m so melancholy I want to step off the curb.
Later that evening – with my girls – J, A, S, and S – I’m laughing and having a good time – and another friend comes up to me and I ask her how things are with her mom and she said last we spoke, my mother told me she had one regret in life, that she didn’t abort me. And I sink into despair for her. How do you overcome this rejection in your life? When I discussed wanting to be a mother to E we talked about how motherhood was my own mom’s single joy – she has said this so many times. And her mother said the same thing.
And I tell S the next day that I was in such a cocoon for three years when we returned from NO – I had wrapped myself in it to protect myself because I didn’t want to be in California. And it was my undoing.
And that afternoon I sat in a meeting admiring my colleagues and our vision and then I felt like I was being summoned – so intensely that I almost levitated – and sure enough by evening my summons was confirmed. But I must be strong or I will be at sea again.
Came home to a nolafugees party at Handsome Willy’s and lots of speeches about coping here in post Katrina New Orleans. Spoke with M about his breakup and how he is not “coping”. All in all a good group of people – I had pondered the beautiful people in SF but looking around the bar Sat evening the cute boys and girls abound here in the Crescent City – J was DJing and L and I almost danced slow to Me and Mrs. Jones and then nightcaps at Pal’s till I was ready to stumble on home but got the other J with his cute dimples to give me a ride instead of waiting out L who was preoccupied with D.
Then awoke to my mother’s cry for help and took her to the emergency room where we spent the entire day – me sitting by her bedside trying to read, crying over my last correspondence with S, contemplating the LaLa and B’s missive that he will not work on it anymore, and just bereft in general of positive emotions. Then the doctor said she had to be admitted and so now home to feed the Bean, check in and back.
So O tells me in SF – Rachel, you just have to put it all behind you and start looking towards the positive. Okay then. So here is how I am going to flip all this in my mind:
N – I have to be strong because he is clear about his confusion.
S – I have to be strong and be direct about my feelings for him so that he can move on even if it would be comforting to me to have his friendship to lean on.
mom – I have to be strong because I feared what I saw today – her lying on the bed, vulnerable, looking old, seeming fragile.
work – I have to be strong because we are in a crisis that is industry wide and they need me to be in top form.
friends – I have to be strong because they want to see me happy and whole and they won’t settle for this shadow of a person I have become.
LaLa – I have to be strong and wrest a price out of the contractor and some reasonable eta for finishing.
I keep thinking there is an end to these blues, but as EmmyLou sings “one thing they don’t tell you about the blues when you got ’em is you keep on falling because there ain’t no bottom and there ain’t no end” – so you have to stop the spiral somehow – you have to put one foot in front of the other and go on and start looking up and not back.