Posts tagged togetherness

Before our trip to Costa Rica, there was a part of me that thought I was dying. I was rattled with pain - real and imagined - my mind overwhelmed, my body tired. I would lie awake, my fingers traveling to spine, or behind my knee, or my collarbone - poking things I was sure were dormant calamities. Is this just getting old, I’d ask my husband. Yes, he assured me. I have creaks too, I have aches. But he was able to name them for what they were - a pinched nerve, a sore muscle, a pulled tendon, a swollen lymph node because of a cold, allergies. My aches had no name. They were constant and they were profound and they were bullshit - and once we landed in Costa Rica, they all went away.

It was magic, on the heels of malady.

In Costa Rica, I shed my skin. I breathed easier. I stared out into the ocean and the waves calmed me. 

I was happy because I was surrounded by happiness. 

Pure Life was a real thing in Costa Rica, and I saw it and I felt it every day - in nature wild and undisturbed, in the monkeys in trees, in the faces of my children, in the sound of birds, in the Ticos among us, who would not only always smile at us but at each other, calling out their eternal greeting, pura vida pura vida. 

Here was place where people checked in with each other, where they helped each other, where they sunk into the moment, feet first. Never was the friendliness ingratiating or phony. It was lived in, it was pure. It was a balm. 

Each day, I woke up rested, ready to be happy again. We lounged, we sunbathed, we held hands. I was in love with my husband, truly, deeply. It was a week where somehow the five of us decided to accept one another for who we were and take solace in the fact that we were together. We milked every good mood, every adventure, every bit of laziness. 

Before our trip, I felt rifts left and right. Less communicating, more separateness, those wretched devices we are beholden to in our hands, friendships that waxed and waned, and loneliness - which is different than solitude. I finished the final draft of my second novel and sent it off to my agent and sat there biting my cuticles, remembering things like my youth and my first book. Let’s go somewhere, we said. Let’s go somewhere where there is sunshine.

There is such immense privilege in my adult life - there is the option of booking tickets five days out and paying stupid amounts of money to stay at a beautiful hotel, and taking my mom along, why not. I wrestle with this privilege and so I delve back to my childhood, to its poverty and pain, and then some of the guilt recedes. 

But then we get to Costa Rica, and we say let’s accept this happiness. We are here because of a great and powerful marriage of luck and hard, relentless work. We are here because we deserve to be happy, and we can be happy on a dollar budget or we can be happy at the Four Seasons. Happiness is a lifetime’s work, a moment’s reward, and it is up for grabs. You let go of tomorrow, you let go of yesterday and that is Pura Vida. It is difficult when one is predisposed to anxiety, or when one is mostly American, or when one falls back on the tortured soul thing. The thing is real, but it need not be everpresent. 

Watching my mother in Costa Rica was watching happiness unfold. There she was - napping by the shores of a magnificent peninsula, zipining towards the ocean, shrieking joyously at a thieving monkey, using her walking stick in a thick and muggy transient rainforest - hiking miles and miles, with her knees, her aches -  and like the rest of us, she felt no fear - only a quiet, gorgeous contentment, and gratitude. 

For six days we were a happy family.

I’m taking back some pura vida to New Jersey, I told my girlfriends. 

And I meant it. 

I sit here now, awash with memories, wanting to up and leave again; wanderlust, in spades. But I sit here peacefully. There’s excitement once again in the unknown, in what’s to come. I battle ‘what’s to come’ everyday. I worry about future battles, “real” problems again. We have it too good, for it to stay so good. That is my worst fear - and when I was in Costa Rica, that fear went away. My body healed. My mind opened. And I sit here knowing I will have panic attacks again, and I will yell again, and I will lose my fucking patience. But I sit here happily.

You can be a truth seeker, an advocate, intelligent and progressive, charitable, questioning - and you can be happy. In our modern times, when we are inundated with so much terrible information and so much tragedy, horror stories reaching us via Flipboard articles and Twitter and news outlets - it is a mighty fucking feat to just shut it off, turn the valve, and be ok with a trickle and not a flood. It is selfish and in a way, it is our survival. Maybe it is how I survived the first twenty years of my life. 

Happiness is a gift, a distraction, a journey. It is private, and yet it’s there to be shared. I will take it, value it, work hard for it. I won’t question it. I won’t apologize for wanting it, or for holding onto it. 

On the way back from Costa Rica, we flew through a bad storm. The plane shook, bounced and throttled, and it seemed like the ominous dark clouds were going to swallow us whole. Normally, I would cry and try to hide it from my kids, and grasp my husband’s hand till his skin turned white. Normally, I would think it was the end. This time, I settled into the seat and leaned my head back. I listened to Pink’s latest single Walk Me Home, on repeat. And in my mind I repeated a little mantra. We are together in this. We are together in this. My body didn’t quake, as it normally would. I was still, and I stared out the window and found peace, somehow. Somehow, even through a raging storm. 

And when we landed, a lightness, and a happiness. 

under my skin

While the kids were away, I got a tattoo. I took the bus into the city, subway into Brooklyn, all the while imagining the letters on my wrist, on the inside, so that when I glanced down I would always see them, at least a peek, the words full of meanings, in lettering that comes from a Polish school primer, the elementarz which taught me how to write before I ever got to this country. Something for the world to help it figure out something about me.

We were together. I forget the rest. 

I wondered about commas and periods, about the usefulness of punctuation. And how any bit of ink on your skin is meaningful, or should be. Even a single dash. Or nothing at all ~ a string of words uninterrupted. A Walt Whitman quote, often paraphrased like so, until the misquote became the truth. The real words come from Leaves of Grass and they start with ‘day after day, night after night, we were together.’ I read it somewhere back in December, and it was like seeing a light in a tunnel. Something bright along the way, just when you need it most. All I care about lately - in these times - is being with people I love, and making meaningful human connection. Also, an inside joke - because I never ‘forget the rest.’ I carry the rest inside me - but this, on my arm, would be a daily reminder. (Remember, carry ~ but don’t let it drag you down.) 

It felt like spring today. Maybe that’s what did it. The morning started out with sleet, a little snow on its last legs, a measly effort to stick around, like neighbors you invite over who have trouble leaving until they finally get the hint. I decided somewhere around noon that I would go into Greenpoint, on this last day before the kids get back, to see my littlest nephew, and to get inked. 

The kids have been gone since Monday. It’s been cold and dreary, and so seeing them in photographs - California sunshine and short sleeves, their cheeks puffy, their brows sweaty - made it better, made the secret happiness of being without them acceptable. 

It’s a wonder what a person can do when they momentarily stop being a mom.

My days were busy and lazy all at once. I decided when to work, and when to sit back. Time was mine, a gift slipped into my pocket. I read two whole books. I wrote so much. I tidied up and embarked on spring cleaning even though it was so fucking cold and gray that spring in April seemed like a broken promise. I worked out and ate when I felt like it. Days were endless and then over in a flash. And then, night. 

I couldn’t sleep. I lay in bed with the TV on, with three books lost in the comforter, with my iPhone and that game where I buy diamonds to furnish rooms that strange people vote on. I slept with a serrated knife next to me on the bedside table. A bowl full of pineapple chunks. A bottle of water. Night was fitful and finicky. I missed my husband next to me, snoring on and off, me telling him to please cut it out please, are you old now, Patrick? On the third night the kids were away, I meandered online and there I discovered a name - Julia Davis. She’d created a show called Camping and I watched it on my phone which was propped against a throw pillow, me on my side, one eye sinking into the matters, useless. Even in a dreamlike state, half awake and angry about it, I binged the episodes, hoping to be that bold and brave in my choices as an artist. At four am I fell asleep, dreaming of cold British seas and people who have noisy sex in outdoor showers.

What else did I do while the kids were gone? 

I went to dinner with two friends - one close to me, one standing on the horizon. Friendship is tricky, even at forty-one, and maybe especially. It was nice to talk quickly, intimately, about things women talk about. Neuroses, fears, work, marriage and sex, the despair of niceties, travel. We didn’t talk about our kids - not milestones, or report cards, or time-outs. That part I only realized in hindsight. That we didn’t really go on about our children. I’m glad. You can get to know women without having to know how they mother. It is possible. The waiter appeared at our table ~ can I top you off? - every five minutes, and at first we laughed that he fancied us. But then no, no, we didn’t need our waters refilled constantly. Just leave us in peace to discuss cunnilingus and Paris and business ventures. But he was who he was - a quiet little hoverer - and after awhile we just waved him off. Time is precious, when you find time for yourself. 

Later, I thought about men ~ and how they don’t know how to talk this way - or maybe how they don’t want to, or don’t think they need to, and that maybe if they knew how to unload, how to dissect feelings, how to verbalize the things that are hard to talk about - maybe if revealing the tender, doubtful parts of themselves was an instinct - the world would be a much different place. 

Later, I walked down Bedford Avenue to get my ink. You can just walk into a parlor and say this is what I want, on my body, like this, right now. And in a moment - in a little under thirty minutes - something imaginary becomes permanent. It didn’t hurt, but then again this was my eighth one. I stared at my knees, and nodded while the tattoo artist talked about his hometown. He had a drawl and it was soothing. 

Tonight is my last night of being alone. So, I write. I think about the noise that will come back tomorrow, how the house will not be quietly pulsing with ticking clocks and echoes and silence, but loud with feet and shouts, and pleas and bargaining. I write and glance down at my arm, and the only word visible, from this angle, at this keyboard as I type is the word together. 

This is what I did, when the kids were away.