Sometimes we have to look in the rearview mirror for insights into how to move forward in our lives. The time of Covid lockdown, sick with the virus, on top of a job/income on pause, and a cancelled book tour for a novel that took eight years to write......isn't an alluring place to look. But …
Sometimes we have to look in the rearview mirror for insights into how to move forward in our lives. The time of Covid lockdown, sick with the virus, on top of a job/income on pause, and a cancelled book tour for a novel that took eight years to write……isn’t an alluring place to look. But often, that which we resist, is the very thing we need to revisit. I haven’t wanted to re-read this essay in three years. Today, however, I woke up to the smell of toast, and with an exceptional gratitude that I couldn’t quite place. I lived alone, in a sad empty nest, for a long time, and I am a loyal pack creature. The truth is: I’m now in a deeply loving, and highly surprising relationship that just keeps getting richer by the day/month/year, and my nest is no longer empty. This morning I knew it was time to glean the lessons from that particular, and also surprisingly peopled time…to truly find gratitude for this one. I hope that it will help you do the same, wherever you’ve been afraid to look. I know that it’s not healthy to live in the past. But it’s a very good teacher. Please enjoy this essay:
April, 2020
I wake up to the smell of someone in the kitchen. Maybe it’s coffee. Maybe it’s toast. I don’t open my eyes and I don’t know why. I only know that I don’t want to know why. That this smell is a good thing and that there are bad things. Really bad things. And if I keep my eyes closed, I won’t remember what they are.
I also know that this is a new ability I have: my mind on full stop, in my waking moments. And it’s not something I’ve learned from somebody in a hallowed hall, or holy place. Or from somebody whose words are in the stack of dusty books on my bedside table, getting dustier. Or somebody whose TED Talk I watched on my computer that is under my bed, ready to feed me today’s news, and remind me of my overdue bills, and deliver me my mother’s concern for my health and for her own, and all of the things that I’m not thinking about. Yet. Because they hurt. And I don’t want to remember why.
The not wanting to remember cracks the full stop spell. And I remember then why I don’t want to open my eyes. I’m not very good at this selective thinking. It’s only been a month.
But someone’s in the kitchen. I decide to think about only this, just for a few more waking moments.
This is not a game. This is how it has to be. Every morning. If I’m going to be safe, and well, and hopeful, and look for silver linings, and attempt what everyone is telling everyone to be and do right now. Including me. In this daily morning moment in this “difficult time of uncertainty and new normal,” still closer to dreams than consciousness or euphemism, I try for at least some of it.
So I keep my eyes shut, pressing lid to lid because they want to open, and my hand wants to grab my phone and my computer and a wise dusty book all at the same time, and my brain wants to careen through the newly-not-normal details of my life.
Instead, I implore myself to smell. Because I realize in this moment…I can smell. And I remember: I haven’t been able to for a while. And there’s someone in the kitchen making beautiful smells that have wafted up the stairs and under my door and into my bed with me. My bed, my new home office, my new mostly home.
I widen my nostrils and anchor my tongue on the ridge behind my teeth. Open the back of my throat. Let my lungs expand. My lungs are clear for the first time in weeks. But I don’t think about that. I think about this new gift that is in the back of my nose, and now in my sinuses that spread my cheeks into a smile that’s not really a smile. Or maybe it is. Sort of. I don’t want to think about smiling like I don’t want to read books or watch TED Talks or learn from holy people.
Toast.
Yes, definitely toast. Sourdough toast. From the bread we made.
We.
I hold the scent and allow the characters to ride in on it. It feels safe to let myself imagine these characters. It could be either of them: my daughter. Twenty-three. Home from her young adult life in San Francisco, still with a job. My son, nineteen, home from his sophomore year in college and a lost baseball season. I’m not thinking about why. Only that they’re home and one of them, or both, is making toast. I let myself think about that, full stop.
Toast.
That I can smell.
From bread we made.
From wild yeast starter that our neighbor left in our mailbox in a Mason jar.
I almost think about why it wasn’t a nice long over-due visit with tea.
I almost think about why no one in this house is going to the grocery store or anywhere else for that matter.
I almost think about how we wiped down the Mason jar with sanitizer before we brought it in the house.
But I stop the thought.
Toast.
I touch my face with my eyes still closed. I don’t think about why I’m not supposed to touch my face. I’m still smiling. That makes me smile more. With the scent of someone in the kitchen.
Someone-in-the-kitchen relaxes my eyes and helps me to think another calm thought. My daily motherhood is back. I let myself think about a month ago, when the hardest thing I was facing was a debilitating and shameful, and thusly clandestine, haunt that is commonly known as Empty Nest. An unpopular and unsympathetic malady. We choose to have kids and it’s normal for them to fledge. We want them to fledge. Right? So why all the crying and loneliness and abject disorientation?
In short, I was pretending I was fine. I wasn’t.
I was alone for the first time in my life in a farmhouse in Montana. I was holding the banister on the stairs— no one will find me for weeks if I take a fall. I was thinking that way. The grey on grey of winter didn’t help. The truth is: I was hardly eating. I was hardly leaving my bed. I was waking with my eyes wide open at all hours of the night and early morning and I was having a hard time closing them at all.
And then this thing that I’m trying not to think about happened. And I’ve chosen to stay in this room, in this bed, when all I want to do is not be in this room, in this bed. Be with my children who are across the hall. Take care of them. But it’s hard to walk down the stairs, banister and all. I haven’t had energy. And this cough…
I let myself scan the last weeks. I haven’t gotten one of the few Montana tests because I haven’t had a fever and though I have had some of the other symptoms, my doctor says to stay put. Health care workers need them. High risk individuals need them. She thanks me for staying home. And so I have. For a month, I’ve been more or less in this bed. Not heartsick this time as much as just sick. Afterall, I was on the East Coast on book tour, shaking a lot of hands, giving and getting a lot of hugs. Before the phrase I don’t want to think about kept us from each other.
When I need to leave my room, I do it with stealth even though I want to hug my children so badly. I get up in the early morning, make my tea and bring a plate of fruit up to bed, while they’re still asleep. I don’t want them to not be able to smell, never mind breathe.
I pass their rooms, their doors closed like it’s ten years ago and I have breakfast and bag lunches to make and carpool to drive. But they know how to do all of that themselves now. They have Zoom work calls, and online courses. They’re happy my bedroom door is shut. They’re not used to seeing me every day anyway. They don’t need me sitting on their beds asking deep questions. They’re just as disoriented as I’ve been, only in reverse. They’ve been on full fledge. Now they’re home in their rooms with the trophies and the stickers and the posters. This was not the plan.
They came home with twenty-four hours’ notice. “We want to get through this at home.”
Salve, not salt, in the mother wound. I’m glad I kept their rooms dusted.
But how can I possibly be glad for this personal gain? The world has stopped. We are in global pain and it’s a lot bigger than my little Empty Nest issues. People are dying from an invisible enemy. I know this about enemies: it helps to look into their eyes. To wonder how we are the same. To practice on those eyes— our love and our empathy, and yes our fear and anger.
This one has no eyes.
I keep mine closed and admit my dirty secret to myself: I am so deeply grateful that my house has a family in it again. And I am the mother of it. I’ve missed it so. I wonder how many other single mothers are feeling this way right now, their adult children suddenly at home. A guilty pleasure. I feel like a glutton. Like I’m hoarding my children. Like I’ve somehow kidnapped them. Like…don’t admit this don’t admit this…I don’t want this to be over.
And that’s another reason why I don’t want to open my eyes. If I open them, and face the day, I have to face this too. Of course, I don’t want people to die. But I don’t want my daily motherhood to die again either. I feel despicable.
I try to imagine this enemy’s eyes so I can say to them what millions of people are saying all over the world: “GO NOW!”
And if I could look into those eyes, I’d add a small secret whimper: “Thank you for bringing my children home. It’s been the gift I never knew I’d be given. I’ve loved cooking all our family meals and laughing about our family jokes and talking in our family way with these older, wiser versions of my little children. But seriously…it’s time to leave our planet alone, silver linings and all.”
I truly try to picture those eyes so I can stare them down. Instead, I picture health care workers’ weary, woeful eyes above their dirty masks, and I want to drop to my knees at the side of my bed and thank them. That’s the gratitude I should be practicing right now.
And for this: I’m feeling better today. I have some energy. And I can breathe. And I can smell. “Thank you,” I whisper to every force of love and goodness I can conjure.
Now I hear this: Get on your knees.
I’ve only heard this a handful of times in my life, and when I do, I obey. My grandmother was on her knees by her bed with her hands clasped every night of her life.
I keep my eyes shut tight, and slide to the floor, and on my knees I give thanks for these people who are fighting this eyeless enemy which has taken so much and so many. And I give thanks for my returning health.
And on my knees with my eyes closed, it occurs to me that I need to give thanks to this enemy not just for my children being home, but for what it has given to our world too. Dolphins in Venice. Greenhouse gas emissions down. Air quality up. Dogs getting adopted. The elderly getting phone calls. Gratitude for our teachers— not just a mug or a plant on Teacher Appreciation Day. Gratitude for open space, parks, wilderness. Birds. Not just on Earth Day. And this word we throw around: community. Global community. Never have we globally had to face head-on the same common crisis. My father used to say, “The problem with your generation is that you haven’t had a world war.” I never knew what he was talking about. I do now.
With the exception of this Empty Nest thing, I’m a silver lining kind of person. So I say it out loud. “Silver lining.” And then the dark cloud comes back in. The thing that I am on my knees cursing and thanking.
“Go now,” I whisper. “We are limping but we will learn your lessons. It’s time for you to go.”
I kneel there and wonder what force I am speaking to with such conviction. The Covid-19 enemy? God? Mother Nature? Myself? It doesn’t much matter. The fact that I’m on my knees does.
Now I definitely smell coffee. When did they get old enough to want coffee? It was hot cocoa two seconds ago.
And I get this Christmas morning feeling in my belly, and a flood of thoughts rush in all at once, no observance of the dam I have worked so hard to build: What will I cook for them today? What new thing will we learn? Maybe they’ll say yes to a slow walk in the woods to test my energy. The fresh air will do us all good. Maybe it will be a beautiful blue sky day. Maybe we’ll read a book together. They used to love reading books with me. And singing and playing instruments before they got driver’s licenses and left to be with their friends. Like normal teens. But maybe they’ll be like they used to be today. Maybe they’ll want to be with me.
I squeeze my eyes tight against this nonsensical longing.
And maybe it’s because I’m on my knees, or because my eyes are still closed, but my mind starts wanting to hug the whole world: We have bread. And coffee. And a family in a house. None of us is alone. Imagine the mothers whose young adult children are alone. Imagine the single mothers who are alone without their children. Imagine the single mothers who are at home with their small children. Out of work. Or trying to work from home. Or pivoting their entire businesses with no food in the cupboard. Imagine being the mother of a brand new baby, born into this time of global unrest. Imagine being pregnant right now. Imagine being in a hospital delivering a baby without your loved ones. Imagine being in a hospital dying without your loved ones.
The same voice that told me to kneel, now says this: You can’t take on the world’s pain. But you can let go of your own by feeling past your own small room. Feel what there is to feel. But don’t sit in it so long that you forget how to heal. Or forget that you can heal. At some point, you have to open your eyes.
It sounds remarkably like my motherhood voice. And I realize that this month in solitude and sickness with none of my usual jobs or usual anything has turned me into a wallowing mess.
And sometimes…we need to wallow.
The door opens then.
My eyes open.
I stand.
There are my son and daughter. He’s holding a tulip in a vase. She’s holding a tray with a cup of tea and some toast on my favorite plate.
Our toast. That we took turns stretching and folding and baking.
I smile, get back into bed, and say, “Thank you!”
They place the tray at the end of my bed and sit in the window seat where I used to let them sleep sometimes when they were little and sick. I measure. Six feet away.
I take a bite of the toast. “You know, you could live on this bread. The sourdough ferments the flour and it’s full of all sorts of health. Funny how bacteria creates life. But you have to feed the starter to keep it alive. So it can do its work.”
They look out the window at the trees and into the hills like they haven’t seen this view in far too long.
I want to freeze time. But everything must move.
I sip my tea and force myself not to break this moment with mothering. Just to observe silence and togetherness and calm.
But I wonder so many things. I wonder what this virus will create in the way of living. For the whole world. And for my world. When I’m the one in the kitchen and the only smells that come from it are made by me. Because that will happen again sooner than later.
I look out the window too. At the view I have seen exclusively for months, and secretly all winter. I decide that when that word alone comes in with its haunt, I will remember this: I have a Mason jar of life in my home that needs to be fed.
And I’ll remember this too: there are always people who like a loaf of homemade bread, once we can see people again. Touch them. Hold them. Look into their eyes.
I look into my children’s eyes and say, “Thank you.”
“You look like you’re feeling a bit better,” my daughter says. “You needed to take a break and rest, Mom. Maybe this has been a blessing in disguise.”
“You should take it easy though,” my son says in his worried voice.
This is one of those moments that a mother of young adults can so easily ruin by wanting too much from it. From them.
But I don’t care. It’s worth the risk. I haven’t hugged them in a month. And I need this exact version of a hug.
“Can I read you a story?” I ask, looking at my collection of children’s books on my bedroom bookshelf.
They look at each other. I can tell they want to roll their eyes and say no. But this is the time of Covid-19. What else is there to say but, “Yes.”
I ask them to pick a book.
They pick one of our old favorites and pass it to me across the rug.
I reach down, where I have just been kneeling, and I open the book, smiling, not crying.
And I read.
And they listen. Really listen.
And I promise myself:
To get on my knees more often.
To make bread.
And to eat it. Alone or not.
To be well.
To stay safe.
To believe in silver linings.
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