Today, Vivi asked me, “How many weeks before we clean out the pool so we can go swimming?” I told her about two more weeks. We’ll see. But the question made me remember last summer, and this piece I wrote about joy and gratitude and a swimming pool.
Click into this swimming pool if you want to read the story!
This is Boop. He was my last Valentine from Richard. Now he watches over my son.
If you’d like to read the story behind the bear and the boy and the broken broken heart, click the photo to read “Boop.” It was the first real story I wrote on Baddest Mother Ever!
Love is in the air…
My column today at Work It, Mom! is a conversation I had with my kids to see what they think about love. What does it mean to love someone? How do you show someone you love them? What does it feel like when we love someone? Click those cute Valentines up there to head on over!
After Richard died and left our house to me in his will, many people assumed that I would be selling it. As one friend put it, “It will be easier for you to move on with your life if you’re not still in this place.”
I didn’t want to give up our house. Yes, it was too big for just me. Yes, it was a lot to maintain on my own. Yes, every corner and crook held a memory of our time together there. But I didn’t want to give up my house. One blazing hot July afternoon, I came home to an HVAC unit that had been struck by lightning, a green pool, and a leak in the basement. I stomped around cussing and pouring chemicals and mopping and panicking. I didn’t want to let myself start crying because I wasn’t sure how I would stop. I remember glaring up at the brick face of the house as I turned the hose on and shaking my fist at it. To be so huge, it was hugely empty–just me and three dachshunds. That night, as I watched the Atlanta news and ate my dinner all alone in the den, the anchor introduced a story about kids who needed to be adopted. Three siblings who hoped to stay together. It’s hard to find a house with that much empty space–but I had one. A part of my wretched heart opened up at that story because it dawned on me that maybe the house would give me options down the road that I wouldn’t have otherwise. Like any gift, my house held possibilities.
One of the dearest things about Richard’s gift to me is that he knew how much owning a home meant to me. He had grown up with a home–his parents lived in the same house from the time he was in elementary school until after he was out of college. He loved the little yellow house so much that he was furious when the next owners cut down “his” azaleas. My childhood memories were scattered over several places–the trailer in Greenville, the brown house in Hollonville, the old plantation house, the tin-roofed house on the Circle. By the time I was an adult, neither my mom nor my dad lived in a place where I had ever had a room of my own. I didn’t have a childhood home to go back to. Fartbuster and I had bought a house together, but it never felt like a place to put down roots. I didn’t know any of my neighbors there…or my husband, for that matter. When we divorced, I felt like I was being forced into the decision to sell. I rented two more places on my own before Richard and I bought our house. After he left it to me, I had a place I would never have to leave unless it was my choice. So I chose to stay.
Within five years, all the bedrooms were full with three siblings. Not those sweet kids from the evening news–my kids. Yesterday, two of them and I were playing in the backyard when I witnessed something that taught me a new lesson about moving on.
The very idea of “moving on” is an illusion. We put together our lives not by moving away from the past, but by integrating the past into the present and the future, regardless of where we might be.
I’ve told the story before about the bluebird who appeared at our backyard wedding (A Tuesday Kind of Miracle). Well, yesterday, as I sat in the sun and watched Vivi and Carlos playing in her wagon, a pair of bluebirds flitted out of the forsythia bushes on the far side of the yard. I thought I was seeing things. One perched on the fence down by the river–in the exact spot where the wedding bluebird had sat almost nine years ago. As I was marveling at the beauty of the bluebird–and the memory I associate with them–Carlos caught my eye and chirped, “Hello, Mommy!” Time collapsed in my backyard as my son stood in the same place Richard and I had stood to say our vows, and called me by my new name. Mommy.
If I had sold this house and moved in to a new place, I would have missed that moment. I would have missed seeing my Now blend so seamlessly with my Then. As I sat there being happy, it dawned on me that that is what HOME is–being somewhere long enough that stories have time to come back around.
No matter where you go or what you do in this life, there will always be one person that you keep running into: yourself. You’ll spend every second of your life with YOU, so why not invest all that energy and effort into getting to know yourself?
About a week after Fartbuster and I separated, he came by the house one night so we could talk. It had been a rough day for me. I had spent the afternoon at a funeral for the husband of a coworker. He had died too young after a grueling dose of stomach cancer. During the service, I stared at my wedding ring (I hadn’t told anyone that we were living apart yet) and wondered what would become of my life, who would cry for me. That evening, I was overwrought and wrung out and completely used up–so what BETTER time to hash things out with my wayward husband?
So there we met, leaning against the counters in our kitchen. My kitchen. The kitchen. Whatever. And Fartbuster was telling me all about the book he was reading–Hermann Hesse’s “The Glass Bead Game.” In great detail. Greeeeeeaaaat detail. Exhaustive detail. I’m leaning against the counter and listening to him go on and on about this esoteric novel that he probably read because no one else wanted to and it’s as if I finally SEE him for who he really is–someone who thinks he’ll be OK as long as he’s smart. Someone who thinks he’s really special because he’s smart. Someone who desperately needs a pat on the head as he hears, “Gosh, you’re smart!” That had been my job for ten years.
The Glass Bead Game is about the life of a young man who has been raised to be a member of the intellectual elite who goes on a quest to understand other forms of living. So it got Fartbuster thinking about Who He Wanted to Be. (And as a sidenote: remember that Who He WAS at this juncture was a barely employed man with a pregnant girlfriend that his patient and confused wife didn’t know about.)
Finally, he finishes going on about the book. He looks over at me and asks, “What’s your biggest fear in life?’
I considered it for a few moments and reflected back on how I had spent my emotional afternoon. “I think my biggest fear is not being loved. If I woke up in the morning and couldn’t think of anyone who gave a shit about me–that would be my worst nightmare.”
He nodded without saying anything.
“What’s yours?” I asked from my side of our kitchen.
He scrunched up his mouth, rubbed his beard and proclaimed, “Being ordinary. Y’know–wife, kids, house in the suburbs and a job.”
I stared at the pattern in the linoleum to give him time to elaborate. He added, “I want to do something bigger than that, something important.”
Our suburban kitchen ticked with the quiet that hung between us. In our time together, even though I read books just as fancy as the ones he read, I had always been the more practical of the two of us. I like a good Nobel Prize winner myself, but I also believe in paying the light bill. And that part of me had about had enough of making a life with Peter Pan.
“You call that ‘ordinary,’ but I went to a funeral today for one of the most ordinary men you’d ever care to meet. Husband, father, grandfather. Truck driver. House in the country. Watched Nascar. Went to church on Sunday. He was also 15 years sober and helped a lot of other people fight that battle. He was loved deeply and irreplaceable to his wife and daughter. He was funny. He was kind. A hundred people stood out there in the sunshine this afternoon and mourned the fact that he had passed. Just an ordinary guy.”
Fartbuster shrugged and I didn’t push it.
Well, if you’ve been reading here for a while, you know how the story turned out. I don’t talk much about how and where Fartbuster is today, but let me assure you…
Thank my lucky stars that I got out of that marriage with my self intact, if somewhat tattered. I became a person I loved, then I found someone to love. Then I did it all again and again and again. My life keeps getting bigger since that time.
I found this quote about ordinariness and love. Reading it makes me feel a bit smug, because not too many years after Fartbuster placed me in the “ordinary” column, I went to Paris on my own and I found Oscar Wilde’s tombstone. I put on my brightest red lipstick and I kissed the memorial, leaving my mark. It was one of those moments when I looked back across what my life had become, back to that night in our kitchen. Ordinary? Hardly. Loved? Certainly.
In the words of Mr. Wilde: “Some cause happiness wherever they go; others whenever they go.”
Everyone in America seems to be talking about how cold it is (except you, Florida). So let’s spend a moment remembering what it’s like to sleep with the windows open so you can smell the honeysuckle blossoms. Here’s something lovely for you.
