December, 2004. Lyon, France.
I’m lying on top of my green-and-white-striped duvet, on a twin-sized mattress that sits on the floor of my rented bedroom. The room is small, and aside from the mattress, its only pieces of furniture are a white wooden desk and a bookshelf. A rolling rack, like you’d find outside the dressing room at a discount retail superstore, serves as my closet, and the room’s textured walls are ornamented with only a mirror and a print my flat mate’s sister left behind when she moved: an impressionist-style painting of a girl standing alone in a field, with the wind catching her long brown hair and her skirt, as she turns her face away from us and gazes into the distance.
I prop myself up on my elbow and look at the man sleeping next to me. His “bed,” made up of chair cushions that lost their frame years ago, but which have been lovingly recovered to match the turquoise curtains, is even more hobo than mine, and he is lying on his back with his lips parted, snoring lightly as he sleeps off the last of his cold. I want to kiss him, but only in moments like this; never when he’s awake. During the day, he always seems a little too tall, gangly, almost awkward; his red hair, once bleached, now frosted, sits a little too high on his forehead; and he argues vehemently that “tomato” does not rhyme with “potato”, and that “trashcan” is the most nasal, obnoxious, American-sounding word in the English language. And he presents these arguments through crooked teeth.
But, I tell myself, Hugh Grant has a gap between his front teeth, and Adam’s is no worse. And just a few nights ago, lying in these very beds, Adam had professed his love to me in the same awkward, stutter-y, stumble-y way that Hugh does in all those movies I’d been watching with my flat mates over the last few months. And with every movie, Adam’s little bed has migrated closer to mine; our late-night-conversations have gotten later; our episodes of spontaneous hand-holding while walking the cobbled streets of Vieux Lyon have gotten longer, with fingers now interlaced instead of clasped. There are no butterflies here; there was no coup de foudre. In fact, he doesn’t even remember meeting me when my flat mate brought him to a party last September. He thinks we met the next morning, in my kitchen, when he was making poached eggs for the three of us girls, to thank us for letting him crash on our floor. And I’ve corrected him, because I think it’s funny, but the truth is, I hardly noticed him that night either. He was just another guy, drunk, obnoxious, fawning over my pretty flat mates. The only difference between him and the others was that he spoke English.
But it’s me he loves now; it’s me he’s told his innermost thoughts to; it’s me for whom he now skips the parties in favor of watching Finding Nemo on a tiny laptop screen. Maybe romance really is this non-remarkable sense of contentment, this ability to just be. So, awkwardly, so as not to touch him and risk waking him, I lean across the narrow wooden moat between our beds, and I kiss him on the lips.
February, 2006. Llandybie, Wales.
No sooner is Adam in the door and halfway to the couch to kiss me hello than I snap, “I have to get out of this house.”
He sighs. He’s gotten used to this. “Aren’t we going to the gym in an hour?”
“I don’t mean now. I mean in general. I can’t sit here day after day doing nothing anymore!” I pull my legs up under me and hug the faux-suede throw pillow to my chest. Some days, it feels like my body is going to wind up stuck in this position, a ball in the corner of the plushy blue couch Adam and I picked out on when his parents took us furniture-shopping for our new home. 12 Kings Acre has two bedrooms, two bathrooms, a closet-sized kitchen balanced by a spacious living area, and even its own backyard plot. Yet somehow, it feels like I never leave this corner, next to the sliding glass door, where I spend nearly every day reading the New Yorker and trying to soak up as much sunlight as I can – a futile effort, given Southwest Wales’s incessant cloud cover.
Adam sits down next to me and holds me. I make no effort to accommodate him. “Your mum came by again today,” I go on. I assimilated my language months ago – my mother is still “mom,” but his is “mum;” “tomato” still gets a long “a,” but “trash can” has become “waste bin.” Things are easier this way. “I don’t know why she doesn’t call first.”
“It is her house,” he reminds me gently. “When my parents bought it, they didn’t think we’d be here forever. Just for the year while I finish university. Then you’ll be back home with your car and all kinds of things to do, and I’ll be the one with no friends and no job. At least until after we’re married.”
I look down at the ring we picked out in Paris last summer. I want to continue my rant about his mother showing up unannounced, inviting herself in, expecting to be offered tea or coffee, and then complaining to Adam later about how I didn’t drop everything to play hostess to her, but I leave it. He’s right, after all. This is only temporary. And they’ve tried to make me comfortable, with the New Yorker subscription, and the fully furnished townhouse, and overpriced little jars of Skippy peanut butter.
Make me comfortable – it makes me sound like a terminal invalid.
November, 2007. San Diego, California.
“I just don’t know what happened to the girl I fell in love with,” Adam says. Tears are choking his voice, and I hate his accent.
The therapist smiles at me expectantly. She is way too smiley, this girl, and I wonder why her professors haven’t corrected her yet. I also wonder why she doesn’t answer for me, since she’s holding our introductory paperwork, wherein I answered the question, “What do you hope to get out of your counseling experience?” with, “Nothing. I’m already done here.”
I turn to Adam, seated on the opposite end of what feels like a very long sofa, and try to be kind. “That girl wasn’t me,” I protest. “This is me. And if you can’t love me as I really am, then let’s just give up now.” So much for kindness.
Adam and I have been in California for just over a year, married for just under one. I feel guilty, because I should have stopped the wedding before it happened. While he was home last December, for Christmas and to activate his fiancé visa, I spent multiple nights in a row out partying with my old college roommate. We drank, we danced, we kissed for the camera, and I remembered what it felt like to be young, to be really alive. And I realized, at the end of that week, that I hadn’t even missed Adam, who, as it turned out, doesn’t like any of my friends, doesn’t like me going out without him, but doesn’t want to come with me, either. I tried to explain all this to him at the time, but he cried. And I loved him, and it broke my heart to see him hurting, so I took it all back.
Now I’m not even sure I love him anymore. I’m not even sure I can feel anything. I just want out.
“I just want out,” I say to the therapist, and then shoot a pointed look back towards my husband. He looks as though I’ve just slapped him in the face. “I can’t live like this, as your little housewife. Or your puppy who you can tell to come, sit, stay. That’s not who I am. I’m sorry if that makes me too American for you, but I promise you the ‘girl you fell in love with’ was not me, and you just need to forget about her already.”
We leave the counseling center in silence. I take his hand and hold it the whole way home, fingers clasped instead of intertwined. Then I get back in my car and go out to happy hour with my girlfriends.
But when I come home from work a few days later and he asks if I can gather my things and move out of our apartment by the end of the week, I fall into his arms and sob.
Wednesday, May 12, 2010
Tour de Cure essay
They say that some events are so world-changing that corners of our minds become stuck in time and place: where were you when Kennedy was shot? What were you doing when that first plane hit that first tower on 9/11?
When my brother was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, I was 15 and in a sporting goods store with my dad. We were shopping for a lacrosse stick that I would hardly use and would give away a year later, so fleeting was my interest in the sport. My mom called us from the hospital to tell us that Martin had just been admitted with a blood glucose level of 560-something and that we should come over. I made my dad buy the stick before we left.
Inasmuch as I was an athletic dabbler, the chubby nine-year-old in the hospital bed wanted to be an athlete. He loved football, and at the start of his own high school career, he signed up for the team. However, his irregular sugar levels caused him to sit out practices and, therefore, games, until, frustrated and devastated, he ended up quitting.
During the years that followed, Martin took to haunting the local gym, and my dad took to the road as part of the ADA’s Tour de Cure. Then, last year, Dad gave me a bike with the intent that I would ride the Tour with him, but I was apprehensive at best. Not one training ride went smoothly: I walked up hills, I fell over (usually from a standstill), I sat on curbs and pouted, cried occasionally, and screamed at my dad for “making” me do this. I began to see my bike, not as something I was working with, but as something I was battling; I wondered whether it, like the lacrosse stick, was a horrible sporting-equipment mistake.
When it came time for the Tour, Dad signed up for the century (100-mile) ride, and I opted for the more realistic, 30-mile course. But I wasn’t alone: surrounded by diabetics and their friends and family members, I had my brother at the forefront of my mind. Twelve years after his diagnosis, Martin has a personal training certificate and a job as an EMT. He’s majoring in Fire Sciences and looking forward to a career as a paramedic/fire fighter. Most impressive of all, his A1C is 5.8, and his average blood glucose level is about 100. Having left the chubby kid with the fluctuating sugar levels behind, Martin is definitely working with his diabetes now, instead of battling it. And there was no reason why I couldn’t ditch the bratty, motivationally challenged teenager and do the same with my bike.
So I did. I rode all 30 of those miles, through hilly neighborhood backstreets and against the coastal winds. I passed a few people walking their bikes, but I did not join them. I did not fall. I did not cry. And when it was over, Martin met Dad and me at the finish, and the three of us went home to celebrate, as champions.
When my brother was diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, I was 15 and in a sporting goods store with my dad. We were shopping for a lacrosse stick that I would hardly use and would give away a year later, so fleeting was my interest in the sport. My mom called us from the hospital to tell us that Martin had just been admitted with a blood glucose level of 560-something and that we should come over. I made my dad buy the stick before we left.
Inasmuch as I was an athletic dabbler, the chubby nine-year-old in the hospital bed wanted to be an athlete. He loved football, and at the start of his own high school career, he signed up for the team. However, his irregular sugar levels caused him to sit out practices and, therefore, games, until, frustrated and devastated, he ended up quitting.
During the years that followed, Martin took to haunting the local gym, and my dad took to the road as part of the ADA’s Tour de Cure. Then, last year, Dad gave me a bike with the intent that I would ride the Tour with him, but I was apprehensive at best. Not one training ride went smoothly: I walked up hills, I fell over (usually from a standstill), I sat on curbs and pouted, cried occasionally, and screamed at my dad for “making” me do this. I began to see my bike, not as something I was working with, but as something I was battling; I wondered whether it, like the lacrosse stick, was a horrible sporting-equipment mistake.
When it came time for the Tour, Dad signed up for the century (100-mile) ride, and I opted for the more realistic, 30-mile course. But I wasn’t alone: surrounded by diabetics and their friends and family members, I had my brother at the forefront of my mind. Twelve years after his diagnosis, Martin has a personal training certificate and a job as an EMT. He’s majoring in Fire Sciences and looking forward to a career as a paramedic/fire fighter. Most impressive of all, his A1C is 5.8, and his average blood glucose level is about 100. Having left the chubby kid with the fluctuating sugar levels behind, Martin is definitely working with his diabetes now, instead of battling it. And there was no reason why I couldn’t ditch the bratty, motivationally challenged teenager and do the same with my bike.
So I did. I rode all 30 of those miles, through hilly neighborhood backstreets and against the coastal winds. I passed a few people walking their bikes, but I did not join them. I did not fall. I did not cry. And when it was over, Martin met Dad and me at the finish, and the three of us went home to celebrate, as champions.
Tuesday, February 9, 2010
Lions
A few weeks ago, Doug and I went to the zoo, using the free tickets from my dad's zoo pass. (It's strange not to have one of my own, but I guess that's what I get for moving away and then coming back so many times.) Sometime in the past two years, they opened their latest exhibit, the Elephant Odyssey, which speculates on what kind of animals might have coexisted in Southern California 10,000 years ago, and presents a biodome-like habitat where the modern descendants of those animals live side by side. (But not side by side enough to, say, eat each other.) Elephants, lions, jaguars, gazelle, condors - it would appear that all these things used to roam around San Diego before it was San Diego.
We happened to get off the escalator/walkway thing and into the exhibit in the middle of the lion keeper's talk. He had brought a toy - a giant plastic barrel - in the hopes that the pair of lions would be active and entertaining while a bunch of people were all standing there listening to him talk about them, and it worked. We watched the male lion, M'bari, batting the thing around from his perch up on a big rock, and then try to walk down the log to the ground with his toy still in his mouth. He failed ("They're not the most agile cats," the lion keeper explained. "That's why we don't see them in trees."), and as he was stumbling the last few feet down the log, the female lion, Etosha, got up from where she'd been lying, and dashed over to him - half-protectively, half-reprimanding his idiocy.
I fell in love with them immediately after that.
M'bari and Etosha were imports from a zoo in South Africa, along with four other lions, of which three are at the Wild Animal Park and one was eventually sent to another zoo in Oklahoma or somewhere, brought in to widen the gene pool of captive lions in the United States. (I know, I know - as opposed to all those wild lions in the United States.) The pair were meant to be a breeding pair, but it turned out that Etosha just wasn't destined to be a mother: her first pregnancy resulted in a C-section, with no surviving cubs; her second resulted in just one cub, stillborn, with the rest of the litter presumed to be reabsorbed early on, because, as the keeper put it, "We hardly ever see lions having just one cub at a time;" and although her third pregnancy was technically a success, with one stillborn cub and one live cub, she lost interest in her baby after just a few weeks and he began to suffer, so the keepers hand-raised him, and then integrated him with his cousins over at the Wild Animal Park. "He's doing just fine," the keeper said, "but we prefer it when mothers take care of their children." So to prevent any further disappointments, and really, for her health, they had Etosha spayed. (This story all came out as part of an explanation of why Etosha is a little overweight. Thwarted hormones, you know.) But M'bari and Etosha are still a bonded pair, and, per their keeper, still "breed" occasionally, to re-establish their connection, as well as their power dynamic.
For the rest of our afternoon at the zoo, I remained obsessed with these lions. We hadn't taken any pictures because we'd been too busy watching, so I searched the giftshop for some sort of magnet or postcard with their photo on it, to no avail. I couldn't tell Doug the whole truth about what drew me to them so intensely - their relationship, yes, but also the ridiculous connection I felt with Etosha. Finally, a fellow failed mother! Actually, I think it was the combination of the two - that this failed mother could still have a loving, playful relationship, that includes sex, even with her hormones out of whack, which is pretty incredible for an animal that - I don't believe so, anyway - isn't wired to have sex for pleasure. And no, I don't intend on abandoning my own cub, if/when I ever have one, and yes, I know I haven't been spayed, but sometimes my Mirena makes me feel like I have been. Whether subconsciously or consciously, there is a part of me that wonders what's the point of having sex when there is zero chance that it's going to serve its biological purpose.
To re-establish our connection, I guess, as well as our power dynamic.
We happened to get off the escalator/walkway thing and into the exhibit in the middle of the lion keeper's talk. He had brought a toy - a giant plastic barrel - in the hopes that the pair of lions would be active and entertaining while a bunch of people were all standing there listening to him talk about them, and it worked. We watched the male lion, M'bari, batting the thing around from his perch up on a big rock, and then try to walk down the log to the ground with his toy still in his mouth. He failed ("They're not the most agile cats," the lion keeper explained. "That's why we don't see them in trees."), and as he was stumbling the last few feet down the log, the female lion, Etosha, got up from where she'd been lying, and dashed over to him - half-protectively, half-reprimanding his idiocy.
I fell in love with them immediately after that.
M'bari and Etosha were imports from a zoo in South Africa, along with four other lions, of which three are at the Wild Animal Park and one was eventually sent to another zoo in Oklahoma or somewhere, brought in to widen the gene pool of captive lions in the United States. (I know, I know - as opposed to all those wild lions in the United States.) The pair were meant to be a breeding pair, but it turned out that Etosha just wasn't destined to be a mother: her first pregnancy resulted in a C-section, with no surviving cubs; her second resulted in just one cub, stillborn, with the rest of the litter presumed to be reabsorbed early on, because, as the keeper put it, "We hardly ever see lions having just one cub at a time;" and although her third pregnancy was technically a success, with one stillborn cub and one live cub, she lost interest in her baby after just a few weeks and he began to suffer, so the keepers hand-raised him, and then integrated him with his cousins over at the Wild Animal Park. "He's doing just fine," the keeper said, "but we prefer it when mothers take care of their children." So to prevent any further disappointments, and really, for her health, they had Etosha spayed. (This story all came out as part of an explanation of why Etosha is a little overweight. Thwarted hormones, you know.) But M'bari and Etosha are still a bonded pair, and, per their keeper, still "breed" occasionally, to re-establish their connection, as well as their power dynamic.
For the rest of our afternoon at the zoo, I remained obsessed with these lions. We hadn't taken any pictures because we'd been too busy watching, so I searched the giftshop for some sort of magnet or postcard with their photo on it, to no avail. I couldn't tell Doug the whole truth about what drew me to them so intensely - their relationship, yes, but also the ridiculous connection I felt with Etosha. Finally, a fellow failed mother! Actually, I think it was the combination of the two - that this failed mother could still have a loving, playful relationship, that includes sex, even with her hormones out of whack, which is pretty incredible for an animal that - I don't believe so, anyway - isn't wired to have sex for pleasure. And no, I don't intend on abandoning my own cub, if/when I ever have one, and yes, I know I haven't been spayed, but sometimes my Mirena makes me feel like I have been. Whether subconsciously or consciously, there is a part of me that wonders what's the point of having sex when there is zero chance that it's going to serve its biological purpose.
To re-establish our connection, I guess, as well as our power dynamic.
Saturday, January 2, 2010
Welcome the year oh-ten.
Erin and I made our annual trip to Fidel's on Friday, to bitch about things and set goals for the next 52 weeks or so, this time over a liter of margaritas as well as the usual appetizer plate. I've noticed patterns in our lists over the last couple years, and most of the things we strive for have to do with broadening our respective senses of responsibility (pay bills on time, take five min/day to tidy up), or believing we're worth spoiling (pamper ourselves more, go on dates with our boyfriends). Mine usually include writing in some form, this time I made specific mention of the TJ book blog; hers usually include learning to filter the things that come out of her mouth ("It's not cute anymore," she said by way of explanation). Every year has included a gratitude journal, although we didn't used to know there was a technical term for what we wanted to do: write in a day planner every night before bed, one memorable thing that happened that day - a compliment, a joke, a moment of joy. It's a treat, on New Year's Day, to read back through the past year in these happy little glimpses, and realize that our lives don't suck as much as we can sometimes perceive.
For me, 2009 was a year of healing, growth, and rebuilding. No new traumas manifested themselves in my life, at least not ones that affected me directly. And after a huge wedding and quick divorce in 07, and an unplanned pregnancy and drawn-out miscarriage in 08, I needed a year that was sort of neutral. That being said, either 09's resolutions were unofficially drawn up late in the year, or this year's resolutions took effect a few months early: I've been working on my attitude, my work ethic, my ability to forgive, and I couldn't help but thinking, as Erin and I were writing out the requisite goals, how pleased with myself I really have been since mid-summer or so. The revolutions, as we call one subset of our list, didn't seem as violent this year as they have in the past, and the revelations (that'd be the pamper ourselves category) felt deliciously obtainable. Or even obtained.
Some things I would like to work on are getting back into some sort of exercise routine/being more aware of what I'm eating - former healthy habits discarded in the face of all that trauma, and working on my relationship - but I'll need to get Doug on board with that one, and I can't for the life of me think of a way to suggest we read relationship books together without him inferring that something is wrong. All in all, though, I don't feel like the new year is so much a fresh start as a continuation of an upward trend. And that in itself is more refreshing and hopeful to me than the past few years' demands for a do-over.
For me, 2009 was a year of healing, growth, and rebuilding. No new traumas manifested themselves in my life, at least not ones that affected me directly. And after a huge wedding and quick divorce in 07, and an unplanned pregnancy and drawn-out miscarriage in 08, I needed a year that was sort of neutral. That being said, either 09's resolutions were unofficially drawn up late in the year, or this year's resolutions took effect a few months early: I've been working on my attitude, my work ethic, my ability to forgive, and I couldn't help but thinking, as Erin and I were writing out the requisite goals, how pleased with myself I really have been since mid-summer or so. The revolutions, as we call one subset of our list, didn't seem as violent this year as they have in the past, and the revelations (that'd be the pamper ourselves category) felt deliciously obtainable. Or even obtained.
Some things I would like to work on are getting back into some sort of exercise routine/being more aware of what I'm eating - former healthy habits discarded in the face of all that trauma, and working on my relationship - but I'll need to get Doug on board with that one, and I can't for the life of me think of a way to suggest we read relationship books together without him inferring that something is wrong. All in all, though, I don't feel like the new year is so much a fresh start as a continuation of an upward trend. And that in itself is more refreshing and hopeful to me than the past few years' demands for a do-over.
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