Signs of Life (21 page)

I am taking stock right now at this moment. I do feel better and I know exactly when it happened. When my son smiled at me, when he was able to communicate his approval and love, that’s when something fused in my brain. At that moment,
motherhood body-slammed wifehood and deemed herself to be bigger, stronger, and downright more important. My FMG sits on the stoop of my house in her puffy winter coat and nods in approval. She doesn’t judge me for imagining myself pummeling a religious figure in defense of my son. She shrugs her shoulders and explains it’s a primal instinct. “And,” she adds, “motherhood is all primal instinct.”

•  •  •

I am catching up on my podcasts of
This American Life
. The episode from the end of December is titled “Home Alone.” The last story, the most intriguing story, was about a woman who was held hostage in her own home with her two children.

For a while I’ve been thinking about the idea of a new year. Who was I last year? At one point I was married, then I was married and pregnant, then I was widowed and pregnant, and then I was a widowed mother. I can’t help but be a little nervous as I wind up to face another year. All throughout January, part of me has been thinking,
God, I wonder what horrible things will happen this year
. “Home Alone” comes at me at just the right time.

Ira Glass introduces the last story as “when the scariest thing possible actually happens.” Of course, I find this intriguing. I thought that was my situation.

A young mom named Ezra had married a man named Raymond. They lived in a two-bedroom apartment in New Jersey. When they got married, Raymond was earning an honest living selling jewelry. Years later, a family member got him involved in dealing cocaine. The job change had affected their relationship for obvious reasons. Ezra and her daughter, who at the time was in kindergarten, tell the story. Raymond had been gone
for several days, but the daughter remembers nothing about her parents having a damaged relationship, nor did she ever suspect her father was a dealer. One day a man came to the door asking for Raymond. Ezra said he wasn’t home and she had no idea when he would be back. The man said Raymond owed him money and he was not leaving until Raymond showed up. He then showed her his gun. After a phone call to his “boss” in Florida, the man told her that she and her children would be killed if Raymond didn’t show up.

Ezra tells the story confidently, although she reveals that at the time she was scared to death. But she did not show one hint of fear to the gunman or to her children. She told her children that their dad’s friend was staying with them for a few days. The kids didn’t think anything of it. After a few days of fearing for her life, Ezra realized she had to come up with a plan. Ezra started dropping hints to the gunman that she had connections with the mafia and the police force. Both were lies, but the gunman bought it. She overheard him on the phone with his boss saying he didn’t feel safe. She had the upper hand. Finally, Raymond came home and settled up with the gunman. Before leaving, the gunman profusely apologized to Ezra and begged that she didn’t send her “family” after him. Ezra said this was the moment when she thought,
Damn I’m good
.

Ezra admitted that this event changed her. Nothing fazed her after this. She became fearless when confronted with all situations. Her daughter tells another story that took place after Ezra’s metamorphosis. Ezra, who was five foot two, worked as an insurance agent. One day an angry client stormed in and started yelling at Ezra. He became so enraged that he threatened bodily harm to her. In response, Ezra calmly stepped out
from behind her desk and said, “Well … have at it.” The man left and never bothered her again.

I am inspired by this story, obviously. Who wouldn’t be? Another mom going into survival mode and coming out victorious. I always think that I’ve got the worst situation on the planet, but I don’t. And who cares about who has it worse? The best part of the story is how Ezra, despite her stress, fear, and angst, was able to convince her children that everything was okay. Day in and day out she went on as if everything was normal and in doing so she protected her children from a horrifying situation. Every day they went off to school laughing and playing and never suspected that their lives were in danger. A situation that could have landed them in therapy for years was averted because their mother made a choice to handle it. That’s how I want to be. I want to be Ezra.

With all of this in mind, I consider how I want to live this year. In this past month I’ve confronted the new year tired with bags under my eyes, my shoulders hunched forward. I’ve crossed the threshold of the new year wearing my blue bathrobe, my sweatpants, my slippers, my hair a mess, my eyes watery, my arms and legs weak. I hold Kai, cradled in my arms, but I am hardly able to lift him anymore. My motto: “I can’t take another day, let alone another year.”

But I don’t have to be Gregor Samsa. Gregor woke up one morning and found himself a bug. Something happened to him and he had no control over the results. Something happened to me too, but that doesn’t mean I have to lose my identity. I can control my metamorphosis.

After listening to Ezra, I have a new image. It’s the image I want to take on this year. I see myself with war paint on my face, my hair tied back in a tight ponytail. I am wearing a camouflage
Under Armour sports bra as my muscles bulge from underneath. Kai is thrown over my shoulder and he laughs at the chaos that surrounds us. I have a machete between my teeth, and a pack on my back that holds a bow and arrow, a Buck knife, wipes and diapers. I look determined, strong, bold, and fearless. My motto: “Well … have at it.”

as
I rush from Kai’s bedroom to heat up a bottle, I catch a glimpse of a splotch of jelly on the floor. The splotch is about the size of a quarter. It’s been there for a few days, I can’t quite
remember how long. I know how it got there because the other night I was eating a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for dinner while I was holding Kai and I spilled this little bit on the way to his room. I’ve been meaning to clean it up, but I just haven’t gotten to it. It sounds ridiculous when I say this. How have I not had the three minutes it takes to clean up this jelly? Clearly, I’ve had three minutes in two days, but it’s still there. When I do find three minutes, I don’t rush to clean it up. I don’t really care that there’s dried jelly on the hardwood floor. Just like I don’t really care that I pull my hair back in a sloppy ponytail every day and hardly brush it. Why clean it up? Why use a hairdryer? I have half a mind to buzz my hair. My FMG tells me I’m not allowed to shave my head. She says she needs to see a signed note from my therapist first.

The jelly on the floor is my whole life. Everything is a giant mess. My house is the metaphorical representation of the inside of my brain. There are laundry bins throwing up everywhere. The refrigerator hasn’t been cleaned out in a century. But I’m so tired, I can’t get caught up. And sometimes, even when I do have some time, I just need to lie down, clear my head, and spend some time with my grief. I feel adrift. I had such a good few weeks, and now I feel exhausted and completely uninspired. My Ezra moment has vanished.

Sometimes I think my grief is like a physical injury—every day there’s a little more range of motion. But that doesn’t work because some days it feels like the pain is getting worse instead of better. The range of motion becomes more limited. When I look at that dried jelly and the laundry bins, I think grief is a really sloppy roommate who just leaves his shit lying around everywhere. Lately, things feel more like grief is having one arm cut off. Some days are good and I think, wow, I can really do this with one arm, look at me, making it work with one arm,
and I never knew how useful each finger was, and even each toe! But then other days when I haven’t had a lot of sleep and I feel sadness pull at me like a giant magnet, I look at that little splotch of jelly and think how this life is just really fucking hard with only one arm.

The bottle is warm. I see the jelly on the way back to Kai’s room. I let it sit. I’ll get to it eventually.

I’m certain that part of this shift of dealing with a messy house and messy brain comes as a result of going back to work after maternity leave. There is just less time to get things done and a lot more to think about. There is no doubt, however, that it is good to have a place to go and be forced to think about the needs of my students over the needs of myself. Grief seems to be a completely egocentric emotion, but teenagers even have me beat when it comes to being the center of the universe.

Right now in eleventh-grade Honors English we are reading
No Exit
by John-Paul Sartre. Sartre was a French existentialist philosopher and writer. Existentialism is an incredibly complicated philosophy. The one basic component that we consider is Sartre’s idea that “your existence precedes your essence,” meaning you are not what you believe you are; you are a product of your actions. There’s a lot more to it than that, but that’s about as far as we get in eleventh grade. Anyway, in the play
No Exit
there are three characters: Garcin, Inez, and Estelle. All three have landed themselves in hell for sinning in various ways and they are there to torture each other. The play does a lot of interesting things, but one of the main things we talk about is how it exposes this philosophy of what you are over what you say you are. We start off at the basic level.

“Raise your hand and give me an example of when a person—do not name names—says they are something, but their actions prove them to be something completely different.”
The room is silent. I already know how this will go. They’ll be silent and then they’ll get into it when they see what we’re getting at. Finally, after waiting for a little bit (not long enough, that’s always been one of my problems), I say, “Have you ever heard someone say, ‘Yeah, I know, aren’t I
such
a good friend.’ [I do a really good imitation of a snotty high school girl. It’s not a Valley girl, which is what you’re probably thinking; it’s more entitled white girl. It’s killer.] But really that person is a horrible friend. She talks about other people behind her back, she never asks questions about other people or sounds interested, and if a cooler crowd were to come along, she’d be gone in seconds.” I see heads nodding.

“Popular,” Leah Simon says from the front row.

“Excuse me?” I’m not quite sure how this connects to my imitation.

“People would call themselves popular, but they’re really not.” I turn and write
popular
under the heading “Essence.” This conversation is a total Leah Simon topic. On most days, Leah wears a worn-out green army jacket, baggy pants, and her black Doc Martens. She has long black hair that is usually tied back in a messy bun. She is incredibly bright but prefers to show people how sassy she is over how bright she is, though sometimes she can hit them both with the same chord and it’s awesome. Other times, she just sounds impolite. One time before class, Leah picked up my picture of Kai and said, “Your baby looks creepy in this picture.” I had absolutely no idea what to say. I just had to initiate an inner chant in my head that said something like, “Don’t swear, don’t swear.” I told her to set my baby’s picture down and find her seat. I really hope one day she realizes how she can be wickedly intelligent in a way that would make her incredibly successful.

“What word can be put under the heading “Existence” for
popular people?” I ask. I look around the room to let the class know that Leah doesn’t have to answer this. She does anyway.

“Well, they suck, mostly.” The class laughs and luckily Leah’s poignant observation of high school social hierarchy catapults us into a rich conversation.
Leader, good sport, honor student
(I love that that phrase made the board!)—all of these words are our essence, but what about our action? We talk about whether “honor” students actually behave in an honorable manner. There is a lot of snickering from Ryan Dannerman and Doug Treen. For one of their group projects earlier in the year, Ryan and Doug somehow incorporated the two of them playing Guitar Hero in front of the entire class for five whole minutes.

By the end of the discussion, they’re beginning to get it. I assign the entire play for the weekend. When I sit down to reread
No Exit
, as with everything else in my life, I think about Josh. Garcin, the only man in the play, worked for a pacifist newspaper when he was alive. When war broke out, he fled. Garcin is convinced that he is not a coward and all he wants is for Inez, another character, to validate the fact that running away from his ideals does not make him a coward. She will not admit this. In the midst of their argument, Garcin gets frustrated and says that his life ended too soon, and that if only he’d been given a little more time, he could have proved that he was the hero that he had dreamed himself to be. He could have proven that he was a real man. He asks Inez, “Can one judge a life by a single action?” Of course, the audience knows that this is Garcin’s main problem. The existentialist would say, yes, you can judge a life based on one single act.