Something on My Mind

Something on My Mind 

I am a calm woman. Every day, when I wake up, the first thing I do is take ten deep breaths. I inhale deeply, so that the oxygen flows all the way to my pubic bone, and I exhale until the capillaries nearly burst. It’s soothing and prevents the anxiety that accompanies the dawn of day. When I’ve taken my tenth, I open my eyes and say three things that I’m grateful for out loud. My dear friend, Anne, and the inspiration she affords me. A song that comes on the radio at just the right moment. A lovely memory of grandma hanging up white sheets in the back yard in Massachusetts where  we used to go every Labor Day and you’d dress me in plaid dresses, always white, but with different secondary colors each year. I think that year was purple, kind of plum-ish, somewhere between ripe and, well, actually, I’m not quite sure what shade plums are. The plaid was purple though. Or maybe green. 

            I rise from bed and get on the floor belly-down, lengthening my spine in cobra, then flow for ten minutes between downward dog and warrior two. I stand, reach my arms high above, and bend to each side, left, then right, then both three more times. I spend fifteen minutes on the stationary bike before a warm shower, warm but not hot, and then I begin my day. I am a calm woman.

            I’ve been seething for five days.

            Today is Saturday. I walk into the kitchen, and to small delight, the place is surprisingly in order. The dishes are done, drying in the rack to the right of the sink. The mail that usually litters a third of the marble island is filed away or discarded. The newest save-the-dates have been stuck to the fridge and those that have come and gone have been tossed in the basket along with a banana peel, a tissue that went through the wash in my jeans pocket, and a plastic yogurt cup I should have rinsed and recycled.

            My smart coffee maker squeezes out the final drops of its brew. I set the default to brew every morning at 7:15, with a text confirming that, yes, I do want coffee tomorrow at 7:15 set for 8:35pm the night before. I pour a cup, add a splash of oat milk, and am out the door at 7:22. At 7:23 I burn my tongue and the roof of my mouth taking a premature sip at the stop sign at the end of my street. I should have waited until 7:25.

            When I’m out, being busy, being productive, I am trapped in a variable feedback loop. Some days I am surging forward, kneecapping challenges and asserting to the world that I am a force that controls itself. Today is the opposite; I am a blur in an impersonal, impressionist painting.  It’ll be nice to have avocados in the house again, and it is a relief to finally get my brother’s birthday gift to the post office, but today, these are time fillers filling the emptiness in me. 

Many days, when I feel this way, I can’t help but picture you passed out on the living room couch, a fifth of vodka tucked between the cushions, the alcohol emanating from you with the stench of gasoline, like lightning strikes of apathy striped across my brain. I push the picture away. I need a new dress to come and see you. 

            After a few more errands that are not exciting enough to mention, it is 10:30 and I decide that an additional dose of caffeine is required to get through the late morning and early afternoon. The coffee shop is minimal, empty space and a couple silver machines pumping out espressos for two baristas covered in green and purple tattoos, smart tattoos, but ones I’d never get myself. Who would ever want to explain themselves that often? 

            In line is a young boy with his mother, who is talking the day away on her phone. A different boy and his younger sister, hyper blond hurricanes, giggle and chase each other in small circles two spots further down the line. He should be laughing, giggling too, peeking to see if his mother would notice him inching off to partake. But he is not. He stands deftly at her side, examining the two children children, listening with his eyes in a way I know he is an adult child in the same way that I was an adult child.

 He sees me studying him, and I hold my gaze just a second more before I offer a slight smile and stop intruding on his life. He seems to understand that I am a child adult. 

            One time, when I was eleven or twelve, your left-hand turn was too shallow and you began driving into oncoming traffic, the wrong way down a one-way. You picked me up at the front of the mall and I could tell you were a little off; you had that thing going on where you closed your right eye intermittently to get a grip on the depth of your focus, like a person taking an eye exam on one of those x-ray sheets at the doctors office. Please read down the line for me Sarah: “a,x,c,z….a Dodge Ram going forty-five coming straight at me.” I started screaming and waving, and luckily the man in the truck was paying attention. There was a partition thirty yards down the road you used to enter the right side of traffic. I shut myself in my room for five hours crying. I never told dad. I didn’t want him to worry. 

            I pop my espresso shot and pipe up; normally I  order iced coffee, but today I don’t feel like maintaining the charade that this is anything other than two hours of energy. I return to my car with a heading to buy the dress.

            My cell phone vibrates in the cupholder. Aaron, my boyfriend, is checking in to say he’ll be home in two hours. He asks what he can expect for dinner, and I tell him nothing, I’m sorry, but I’m having dinner with my mother. He asks why I didn’t mention to him that my mother invited me over for dinner, and I tell him she didn’t, I asked if I could come, and the silence hangs like two shoes on a telephone wire. After a moment he says: “alright babe, love you. See you tonight when you get back.”

            “I love you too.”

            I’m hard on Aaron. I’m hard on Aaron because I am brutal with myself. I’m brutal with myself because of you. I didn’t want anyone to know; I did everything I possibly could to pretend I was fine and that there was nothing wrong. I pushed myself to extremes. In school, in sports, even in love. I held everyone around me to the same standard I imposed on myself, because it wasn’t fair, I shouldn’t have to feel that pain by myself. I pushed people too far. I pushed them away.

            The long mirror in the changing room is one I want for my own bedroom, slimming and revealing. Six dresses have already been tossed aside; three navy’s, a charcoal gray, a light green, but this color, this plum-ish purple is exactly what I’m looking for. It’s professional and spirited, serious with a plausible deniability of playfulness. I check the price tag and it’s not egregious. It’ll look good on me tonight. Tonight, when I finally tell you how I feel. 

            I told you when I left for college that I didn’t want to speak to you anymore. I was in pieces and I was the only one who knew how to put them back together. Thinking back on it, I’m not sure I did ever tell you that I didn’t want to speak to you again. I left without saying goodbye, I didn’t call home that first week, one week become two, two become a semester, and before I knew it, Christmas break had arrived. 

            It took every fiber of strength in me to break away from you. You weren’t my mother anymore. For a long time before I left for school you were a drunk stranger that lived in the house that I happened to live in. When I pass a homeless person, to this day I have to fight back panic attacks. Because that’s what I thought you’d be mom, that’s the only way I thought I’d ever see you again, as a ghost I would recognize handing a dollar or  spare bit of change. It destroyed me letting you go. It was the only way I could survive. 

            And what did you go do? After eighteen years of me at home, after we picked you up unconscious in the snow at grandma’s that Christmas? After you fell down the hill and rolled into the chain-link fence at my little league game? After I helped dad carry the sofa out that you peed on so many times, we couldn’t flip the cushions over anymore? After all the dings and dents in the car? After I had to tell Melissa that you backed over half her garden peeling out of the driveway like a mad woman? After Atlanta, after rehab and then rehab again, after I loved you and hung on to you so long that I detested myself, after I finally, finally let you go mom, what did you go and do?

            You got sober. 

            Like it never even happened. You stood on your two feet and got sober. For six months, for a year, for two years I treaded lightly, terrified that so much as disturbing any balance you magically found when I left would cast you back to the oblivion that I knew. For so long mom, I was the strong one. I convinced everyone that I was a rock. Look at my grades. Look at my fitness. Look at my accomplishments and talents and smile.  It was devastating, but at least I could be strong around you. Around everyone.

            Now, when I see you, I still tiptoe like I’m about to shatter glass in the night. I feel like a mouse in a barn of owls. I’m so glad to have met you mom. I’m so grateful to know who you are. I’m so proud of you, and now that I have a bit more experience with pain and sadness and frustration and nothingness, I’m in awe of what you’ve been able to transcend.

            And sometimes, as is true now, I am filled with rage because of you. What you put me through, what I had to learn at such an early age is not something that ever goes away. How do I tell Aaron I’m not sure I ever want to have kids, because I’m petrified that fog of nihilism will rise up between my own feet? Dad was a good, flawed man. How do I apologize for all the times I berated him for not divorcing you? How do I get this feeling to go away, the anger I feel towards him for not trying to help you more, even when I know he helped you too much, that so much of him died trying to find you? How do I tell you that I want to go out in the back yard and build snowmen and kick soccer balls with you? Not as a twenty-nine-year-old with an apartment and car payment, but as a little girl who just wants her mom to smile and dance with her and tell her that she’s going to be okay? How can I let you know that everything you see in front of you, all the drive, all the success, all of the talent, is in spite of you, not because of you, and the dogged determination people praise me for is nothing but the distraction of a sad little girl who had to teach herself that the world is a big, terrifying, awesome, horrible, wonderful place?

            You open the door and let me in with a warm embrace. I’ve brought stuffed clams to heat in the oven and you’ve put out shrimp and cocktail sauce. There’s cheese and crackers too. You’re lovely. Empathetic and understanding, strong and passionate. Your smile is radiant, and only when the light shines at just the right angle can I see the scar above your right eyebrow. We spend the night laughing and joking, eating roast beef and picking at what’s left of the cubes of muenster. It’s bliss, that this moment is here, right now, that it even exists.

           You cock your head to one side when my exuberant smile betrays a dash of lost time.

            “Is something on your mind Sarah?”

            I fix the dent in my smile. “No mom, I’m just happy to see you. I love you.”