Halfway Down

It made me feel like I’d been socked in the stomach. The last time that actually happened to me was when I was 8 or so, about to go Christmas Caroling or Trick or Treating with the neighborhood gang. DJ, for some unknown reason, possibly none other than he was a boy and I was a girl, hauled off and hit me in the stomach. I remember the shock, feeling breathless and how I bent over and clutched my side, but I don’t remember if I cried or if I even told on him. I suspect I did both.

Today there was no physical contact – isn’t that one of the points of getting divorced in the first place, so you can avoid that? Even so, his unwillingness to intend to make child support payments left me feeling out of breath and queasy. I’d say there was shock, too, but you’d laugh at me and ask me how stupid I could be and hadn’t I learned after all these years?

This time, I didn’t double over or clutch my side. I didn’t cry and, unless you count this, I didn’t tell on him. The lawyer will take care of that. She’ll also make sure that child support is stipulated in the divorce agreement. Easy for her to say. The practical matter of securing those payments is still left to me. Same old, same old. Shit.

We left the lawyer’s office together. He rode off in his groovy leather jacket and Momo helmet. I pedaled my way to school to get our youngest, pit in my stomach, some kind of viscous rot running through my veins.

The day-in-day-out patterns of addressing the logistical needs of kids, home and the tangents and intersections of the two, gives me a structure to cling to so I can pretend there is no disturbing underlying current that is ready to sweep me away. It’s like crawling along a ladder that’s been temporarily laid across a storm-swollen river. At school I greet parents, smile at my daughter, her friends, I offer a snack. We stop at the park on the way home to satisfy her ever increasing 8-year-old social needs. I hold it together, the frustration and outrage no longer thundering through me. The pounding surge that was looking for an outlet found none and so has no doubt gone to lodge itself in the deep recesses of my psyche. There it’ll become some sort of integral part of me, one that will get mirrored back time and again until I allow it its proper place, center stage.

Long before playtime is up at the park, my daughter starts hammering at me. She’s hungry, she’s thirsty, she wants a different ball, a different friend. She makes her demands, I make my excuses, she is unrelenting in her refusal to accept my explanations. This isn’t my usual happy-go-lucky third kid - the only recourse is a quick escape so we stomp our way home where she tries to take refuge in the Disney Channel and I, in making dinner. Everything and everyone is tense and prickly as we go through the motions aiming for bedtime, the finish line where I’m hoping I can find temporary relief in the form of unconsciousness. But she resists even the comfort of crawling under the covers and despite my threats, she insists on the need for a glass of milk and heads down the stairs in her stocking feet to get one. I hear the slip and the boom, slap! as some part of her body hits the stairs and breaks her fall. I know from the sound that it wasn’t a long, extended tumble and the immediate wail that follows is definitely an "I need attention" one rather than an "I am seriously hurt here" cry. Her tears then come, fast and easy, the sobs loud and penetrating. I go to her, to where she’s slumped against the stairwell, waiting for me to come hold the space so she can finally crack, finally let go and let God. We sit there together, huddled on the cold stone step half way down, and as she cries, we rock, and I think "what was that they say about kids acting out the disowned parts of their parents?"

Slant

I have a moveable office. That’s how I’m choosing to look at it, anyway. It’s my current best effort at trying to see Life from another perspective, turning things around, inside out, upside down. I figure it’s like my daughter’s argyle sock – it’s functional whether turned right side out or not. But worn inside out, though you still see the diamond zigzag pattern, its coherency is rendered fuzzy due to the uneven ends of all the threads that twist and curl in unruly fashion. Right side out, the pattern is smooth, lucid and balanced, the diamonds clearly stacked, the diagonals finely crisscrossing, suitably hugging her calves and ankles. That’s the kind of job I want – one that’s lucid and balanced with diamonds stacked, one that hugs me in an appropriate way.

From an ordinary standpoint, you’d see that my job is actually being a driver guide for tourists coming and going to and from our fair Tuscan city or visiting its surroundings. You’d see that inherent in the job is a lot of down time, waiting by the fancy Mercedes van for my clients to collect their bags from the carousel at the aereoporto, get their fill of some hillside medieval village, or finish up the last digestivo or after-dinner drink at the convention’s gala dinner. You’d see that to keep from going stir crazy, I bring along my laptop so I have something to do while I wait. It’s a job, I put in my time, I bring home the bacon - it’s a means to an end. You’d see me arriving home, a casa, tired and a bit frayed at the edges, fuzzy and incoherent. You’d see that I have little left to offer the kids and the messy house, both rightfully clamoring for attention, unawares of how energetically drained I am from another day’s worth of reacting to the needs of others.

But seen from another point of view, I am a writer with a moveable office. The office chairs are cushy smooth gray leather seats, some with armrests, all reclinable. When alone I have 8 chairs to choose from and usually sit comfortably in the center seat of the middle row, propping my feet up on the armrests of the seats ahead, my lap as my desk where my computer sits. I can choose to let the noise and elements of the outside world in through an open sliding door and rolled down windows or I can baton down the hatches and be only unto the computer screen and myself. When I’m not writing, I switch to a different office chair and take charge of moving the office from here to there. Wherever I go, I’ve got better than a corner office with a 360-degree view (minus the blind spots). I spend this downtime gathering material for my stories, interviewing those who come to my office for a spell, noting the impulses I get from the scenery that speeds by my office window. At the end of the day, I’ve put in my time and I’ve brought home not only the bacon but also a whole larder full of foodstuffs to help nourish my creative longing. There might even be a story or two in my Documents file. Sure, I’m tired, but in that self-satisfying way from a job well done. I arrive home to the same kids and the same house with enough umph to see that between the dust bunnies and piles of laundry, there’s comfort to be found and soothing hugs to be reaped from latchkey kids, who like me, are doing the best they can.

I explain to my clients (who are mostly Americans) that here in Italy people are not defined by the job that they do. This is why when you first meet someone, after learning your name, they are more likely to ask you your astrological sign than what you do for a living. It’s not that they don’t care. It’s that they know that who you are is more about how you go about what you do each day, not specifically what earns you a paycheck.

I’ve yet to declare myself successful in having secured a job that qualifies as lucid and balanced and I’m far from having my diamonds stacked, but I do feel that I’m on the right track towards living my life in a more appropriate fashion. It seems that the trick is to not let life drive me crazy, but rather to make sure that I’m the one in the driver’s seat. It’s all in the perception.

And on that note, it’s time for me to listen to some music. And since my hands will be idle, I’ll just let them have a go at those dust bunnies while I sing along.

Fixing

I have a great teapot. My sister bought it for me in an effort to try to make my life a bit brighter. She said it was whimsical (I love that word – I’d love to embody just that), the little green dots lolling in the white spots on the deep blue background. It’s a sturdy one, crafted in Poland, a bit heavy even without the tea inside. The curve of the pouring spout and the arch of the handle, lined with the dots that tickle my hand as I pour, lend an air of delicacy to its otherwise utilitarian nature. It’s big enough to serve tea at a good size tea party. Except the top fell and broke a while back, so I suppose it’s not quite presentable for company anymore. Not that I have company over anyway these days. There’s never time. Or space. I still use the teapot to make big pots of herbal tea when one of us has a cold and needs cup after cup of something warm to help flush out the virus. And if it’s just me looking for a cup of tea to soothe my soul, I fill it with less water and use a small metal lid that fits kinda sorta over the top. I suppose the tea doesn’t steep properly that way, but it’ll just have to do until I get around to repairing the broken lid, the pieces of which have sat in a plastic bag on the windowsill for months now, waiting patiently for attention.

Life races so fast these days that those moments of comfort derived from having a cup of tea – and everything that goes with it – are few and far between. My sister makes her tea every morning and then attends to her family and house, meaning to get back to the mug sitting on the counter between duties. But by the time she remembers her tea, it’s cold, so she places it in the microwave, sets it spinning to get warm again and goes off to take care of something else that needs doing or someone else who needs prodding so they can get out the door on time. Inevitably she returns at the end of the day to find her once-again-gone-cold tea sitting expectantly in the microwave, never even having been sipped.

Her intentions were good. But modern day life has a way of sidetracking even the best of us from needed moments of comfort. It’s become way too easy to ignore those deeper, subtler parts of ourselves that crave attention in an effort to help us gain balance in an ego-crazed world. We run, we react, we hup to, keeping those plates spinning on the poles for reasons we have long forgotten. More often than not, those parts of ourselves that might remember the reasons and that might have a clue as to how to stop the charade are left to wither on the shelf, the windowsill, or in the microwave, uncared for, broken, untouched.

This morning I make myself a cup of tea and sit down to sip it at the kitchen table near the window, looking for comfort for my beat up self. But sipping the hot liquid makes the cuts on the inside of my mouth hurt and my top lip is so swollen and sore that I can’t drink properly and instead spill the hot tea down the front of my nightgown. So the soothing moment I’m yearning for becomes just another reminder of my bicycle accident yesterday that landed me face-first and broken-nosed on the asphalt after flying over the hood of the car that was pulling out of the driveway. I glance out the window through my puffy eye, shadowed with deep purple, looking for solace out there somewhere because in here my efforts towards finding relief have been unfruitful. What I end up seeing is the plastic bag on the windowsill containing the broken teapot lid. I quickly pick up the bag and extract the pieces, checking to see if there are any small shards in the bottom of the bag that I’ll need to make this thing whole again. I grab a bottle of Vinavil from the cupboard, thinking it might not be the right glue, then discard the thought in my hasty need to put the pieces back together again. I like the feel and the scratchy sound the ceramic makes when I slide the fractured sections together. The glue sticks to my fingers as I wipe away the excess and I rub it into my palm like lotion so that it dries and then rubs off in little dirty balls. The breaks were clean, so except for a little chip on the underside of the lip, the top looks almost like new, its little green dots resting once again in the white spots on the deep blue background – whimsically whole, once again. If it didn’t hurt so much, I’d crack a smile of recognition and gratitude to the metaphor this little teapot lid has offered.

This simple repair job, something that could have been done on the spot at the time the lid actually broke, gives me an immense feeling of satisfaction. It oddly seems to provide the sense of comfort I was hoping for from the tea. Taking time to make things whole again is a good thing to do. I guess sometimes Life is gracious enough to enforce a break in the program, even by way of a broken nose, to offer just that: Time. So much fixing, healing, to do and though I’m not quite sure about the glue, I at least am conscious enough to know that I want to focus on putting the broken pieces back together. I want to take those ignored parts of myself down from the shelf, off the windowsill and out of the microwave.

It’s time.