I don’t know if it’s temporal, situational, or hormonal, this shift.
It certainly resembles the week leading up to my period with its moodiness, its gentle swaying between certainty and confusion.
There are moments, for instance, when I can’t speak anything but the absolute truth; even when I know it will hurt, even if I know I will pay.
There are moments, too, when I slip into a dark tunnel, the Hadron collider of womanhood: understanding that I can’t have both what I want and what I imagined I wanted years ago. They can’t live together in my world of almost 40. They will combust there together and set me on fire.
The kind of fire that burns people.
I can’t stretch my arm far enough down to reach the me who slipped behind the back of the sofa. She’s choking on dust bunnies down there, but I can’t reach her.
I almost don’t even want to.
“Sorry!” I yell to her; the one who dreamed of lots of babies. I leave her with the dust bunnies, and run off instead to play Hickory Dickory Dock.
Yesterday I took my husband to the ER for symptoms he has been suffering for over a week. Fortunately he was released at the end of a very long day and evening with a diagnosis of pneumonia. Serious, but not as serious as we thought, and treatable with antibiotics. And so … relief.
We both hate the hospital. I suppose most people do. Worse than the fear of germs for me, though, is the overwhelm I experience in the middle of all that humanity.
As much as my sensitivity allows me to understand and connect deeply to people, it also is able to submerge me beneath a deluge of compassion.
I may drown there.
The ill. The ones who are afraid for the ill. The ones who care for the ill. The ones who pray for the ill. The ones who clean the toilets, the floors. The ones who secure the entrances. The ones who drive the ambulances. The ones who are too young to be there. Too old to be there. The ones who moan in pain. The ones who moan with grief. The ones too weak to moan.
Through an invisible intravenous line, they enter me.
It’s rough.
For a while there in curtained off section #17, I wrote poems and jotted down notes for story ideas. Tried to read a few pages of the book I brought with me. Scrolled social media for updates on the three kidnapped boys. Then my husband told me to leave.
“Go get lunch,” he said. But he meant, “Leave here since you are able.”
I never walk around Haifa. Never; except from my parked car to the ER or from my parked car to a doctor’s office and once from my parked car to get my Israeli driver’s license.
In fact, I have never walked around Haifa for fun. Even though I live only a short drive away, I end up in Israel’s city by the bay for appointments or by surprise. And not the kind of surprise you look forward to.
I’ve never explored Haifa even though the views are known to be incredible.
Haifa at dusk from Carmel Hospital
Without much hesitation, I did as my husband instructed. I knew I could use some fresh air, especially since an orderly had just rolled in a new elderly patient who looked as if she was on her way to meet the Maker.
I walked down quiet Smolenskin Street where I had parked the car, past old-school Israeli apartment buildings, some with beautiful gardens.
Garden apartment on Smolenskin Street
and momentarily felt uplifted. I traveled by foot up to Horev Street where I got an hafooch and a cheese croissant at Roladin. I hadn’t had much of an appetite all day. I think the worry finally hit my belly.
I wandered in and out of a few shops, met a Tarot teacher, spotted a Tibetan bowl I liked (hint hint: possibly a birthday present for me!), discovered the Rabbi Yosef Dana steps
HaRav Yosef Dana steps with view of the Mediterranean, Haifa
And, most unexpectedly, stumbled upon a small shop inside a mall on the corner of Horev and Gat, a small corner of which was stocked with used books. A whole shelf full of English titles! From Umberto Eco to VC Andrews.
I was in the middle of debating whether or not to buy Paul Auster’s Oracle Night when my husband called asking me to return to the hospital. I quickly paid for the book based solely on the jacket cover copy and the title (I’m a sucker that way for marketing). Only when I got back to his bedside did I read the first line of the book in a bit of astonishment:
“I had been sick for a long time. When the day came for me to leave the hospital, I barely knew how to walk anymore.”
It stopped me. Compelled me to look over at my husband with a bit of concern. I’m susceptible to coincidence that way in the same way I’m sensitive to the swarm of human emotions.
But he looked okay. Better, even. I wrote a note to myself: Sometimes all is well. Sometimes all is now. Sometimes all is here.
What I meant was: Sometimes if it looks like it’s going to be okay, it actually is. No matter what upset is happening inside the region of your heart.
My husband further allayed my concerns by sitting up and chatting a bit with a me for the first time in a week.
When the doctor came by with a diagnosis (not as severe as we feared) and with a release form to leave the ER, I turned with relief to my husband and smirked, “Thanks, hun. That was the best date I’ve been on in a long time.” My husband gave me a half smile. He knew what I meant. He’s sensitive that way.
“Ever since Gwyneth Paltrow became famous in her early 20s, she has made women feel bad about themselves…” begins Jessica Grose’s article in Slate this week.
Ouch.
This makes me want to write something along the lines of how ever since Jessica Grose starting writing articles in Slate she’s made celebrities feel bad about themselves.
Except I don’t know Jessica Grose.
I don’t know anything about her.
In fact, while I may have read her articles on Slate before, I don’t remember any in particular.
It’s not a jab. It’s just to illustrate how little I know her.
Which is why I can’t imagine laying blame on her for feeling bad about myself.
What has Jessica Grose done to make me feel like an unattentive mother, unaffectionate wife, less-than-compelling blogger?
(Oops. Did I just overshare?)
It’s not that I don’t get the point — how the media, let’s say, perpetuates an unattainable image of women or mothers. But blaming the media is very different from pinpointing one particular celebrity, especially one who actually has made it a point to do GOOD in the world.
It’s mind boggling to me. I feel compelled to defend Gwyneth, except I don’t know her.
But what I do know is that Grose’s article didn’t inspire in me a feeling of comraderie.
It made me feel sad for Grose. And for women who truly ascribe their feelings of inadequacy to female celebrities.
The accusations against Gwyneth, in particular, continue throughout Grose’s entire piece, which was sparked by the recent announcement of Gwyneth Paltrow and Chris Martin’s split. Grose shames Gwyneth (not Martin, by the way, but Gwyneth) for how she chose to announce her separation. The language she chose to use. The means by which she communicated it.
As if getting a divorce and having to actually ANNOUNCE it wasn’t bad enough.
“Underneath that psychobabble,” Grose writes, taking issue with the phrasing “Conscious Uncoupling,” “is the message that goes along with all Goop productions: Even Gwyneth’s separation is better than yours…”
Is that what’s underneath the “psychobabble?” Really?
I didn’t get that at all. Perhaps if I was in the middle of a messy divorce, I’d be envious of couples who seem outwardly to be approaching separation maturely.
My response? I actually considered for a minute or two that Paltrow and Martin might be trailblazers. Better coverage of “conscious” uncoupling than the ugly divorces we normally expect from Hollywood.
Unless, of course, we want celebrities to feel heartbreak and pain because it makes us feel a little better about our own.
The truth is finally spoken out loud at the end of the article when Grose writes of Gwyneth and another celebrity mother, “Their stories are meant to make mere mortals feel inadequate.”
Huh?
I may be susceptible to the “new-agey psychobabble” Grose mocks (I used to be on Goop’s mailing list), but I am under the impression that Gwyneth Paltrow is as mortal as the rest of us are. Maybe even moreso, since she is living her life on a worldwide stage.
Could be that I was won over by the restaurant scene in Notting Hill
but I operate on the assumption that even famous actresses feel shame, anxiety, humiliation, fear. I don’t see any reason to perpetuate the stereotype that they don’t.
My takeaway from Grose’s article is not an urge to join a rallying cry for honesty in media. It’s not a desire to band together as “normal moms” with limited budgets to spread rage about the injustice of personal trainers or nannies or vegan chefs.
I just feel sad.
For women who feel so disconnected from themselves that they have to look to others as perpetrators of their unhappiness.
Women who feel compelled to publicly shame other women, through blogs or through gossip.
And for this reason, I almost didn’t write this blog. I worried that by writing this post I was doing the exact same thing Grose was with her piece on Paltrow.
When my husband and I were first married, we were part of a group of people in Tucson, Arizona designing a new cohousing community— our very own little American kibbutz!
This is actually how the community was described to us by a colleague, and why our ears perked up when we heard about it. We had never heard the word cohousing before then, but we knew what a kibbutz was (or we thought we did) and after the first informational session, we handed over a check and joined as one of the first young couples in a group made up mostly of divorcees and soon-to-be retirees.
We participated in a year or so of planning discussions — during which time I got pregnant with our first child — but in the end decided the community wasn’t an ideal fit for us. When I think of why, I remember most the day we had to decide if we would build a community laundry facility or instead choose that private homes would have laundry rooms.
My husband and I were strongly in favor of an easy access washer and dryer. We had spent too many years shlepping canvas bags to and from laundromats in various cities to give up what we now saw as a necessary luxury. Furthermore, dirty bibs and stinky onesies were in our near future. But the majority of the group thought that building one community laundry facility better fit our group vision. It would be more environmentally-friendly (we could use the gray water on the central lawn!) and would mean our homes would take up a smaller footprint.
This conversation spiraled out of control pretty quickly. Soon it wasn’t about the laundry room, but about how much space we occupy and why. Which became a conversation about the things we need vs. the things we can let go of. Which became — finally! — the real conversation, which was:
There is a stage of life for acquiring things. And there is a stage of life for letting things go.
My husband and I were acquiring. We’d been married less than a year. We had a new baby on the way. Stuff was in our future.
The rest of the group, most of whom were 20 – 30 years older than we were, were ready to let go.
I understood then, intellectually, the difference. But I couldn’t possibly comprehend how I’d ever be ready to let go of my things. I could see parting one day with my Dyson vacuum or saying goodbye to my extra set of Pottery Barn bowls. (Even though I really liked both sets, which is why we registered for two in the first place.)
But I couldn’t visualize or emotionally connect to a time in which I wouldn’t need extra space. For I didn’t travel lightly. In addition to all the gadgets I used to make my life more comfortable, I also carried with me all the signs and symbols of who I was and who I wanted to be.
Art on the walls.
Tchotchkes inside cabinets.
Magnets on the fridge.
All those things that reminded me where I’ve been and where I wanted to go.
All the things we keep so we know when we’re home.
* * *
Since not choosing to buy a house in the cohousing community, my husband and I have lived in 5 different houses. We’ve moved across country, across town, and across the sea.
We’ve lost some tchotchkes along the way. And half of our Pottery Barn dishes.
Accidentally, of course. But, in the larger scheme of life, very much on purpose.
You can’t keep on acquiring forever.
There’s only so much space.
In your closets. In your house. In your heart.
And there’s only so much time.
Losing the Pottery Barn dishes is preparation for the greater losses to come. Dirty bibs and onesies — as stinky as they get — are gone with the blink of an eye, don’t you know? As are the wee ones who used to wear them.
Letting go is a tool we must learn. We have no other choice … but learning to let go is not a group decision.
It’s one we each arrive at on our own.
In time.
Little by little, we get there.
Broken plates, missing teacups, forgotten floor lamps become stacks of letters, boxes of mixed tapes, address books from long ago.
“For years and years, I thought that stories were just practice, till I got time to write a novel,” she told The New Yorker in 2012. “Then I found that they were all I could do, and so I faced that. I suppose that my trying to get so much into stories has been a compensation.”
Your words in The New Yorker were exactly what I needed to read right now, as a writer and as a human being:
As a writer who wishes to breathe life into the characters who infiltrate my dreams, but doesn’t yet know exactly what those characters really want or where they are going. As a woman who yearns to give life to ideas stirring inside my heart — but often lacks the time or the energy. As a human being who is constantly wondering what in this life is practice and what is for real.
Thank you for writing real women, real marriage, real life … in a way that allows the reader to envision the beauty that exists even in those very real, raw circumstances.
I’ll be honest. I’ve only read Runaway, and selected short stories of yours, but you’ve always been a writer I’ve wanted to read more of.
And I love your name.
Alice.
Munro.
It’s a name that deserves celebrity.
I love that you’re Canadian, and that my Canadian best friend loves your writing, and that those two things together make me want to read more of your stories.
I love that your first collection was only published when you were 37. It offers this exhausted and overwhelmed 38 year old mother of three a glimmer of hope.
I love that you’ve lived to be 82, and I wonder if you always knew that you would live this long or if you always thought, like I do, that you were only one year away from dying — a victim of a tragic disease or an automobile accident.
Too bad. So sad. No book for you.
I wonder when your heart stops breaking. Does it?
I wonder when you run out of vivid memories to weave into your stories.
I wonder when you stop caring what people think and just write what you must so that a weight is lifted from your shoulders, and you can move on.
I love that picture of you — the one in which you’re sitting on the edge of the railroad track in The New York Times’ MICHIKO KAKUTANI article. You look defiant, brave, and yet serene.
I wonder what takes more courage? Writing your truth or having it read by others?
Or sitting on the edge of a railroad track?
I win too, from this celebrated win of yours, Alice Munro. Through getting to know you better, I am reminded that writing about what you know is enough.
Writing about relationships, memory, your life in your town. It’s enough.
I don’t need to fabricate tales of magic and mystery. I don’t need to create a romance that is one for the ages.
My life alone offers enough content for me to mine — life itself is a gift to any attentive writer.
Isn’t it?
What would you say, Alice Munro?
To a grown woman who still imagines herself a girl?
To a writer who still imagines herself on the slow road to a Nobel Prize in literature?
What would you say?
Would you say,
“Slow down?”
“Don’t worry?”
Would you say,
“It was all worth it?”
“It doesn’t mean a thing?”
Oh, Alice Munro. You’ve taught me a thing or two just by winning a damn award.
Getting old is better than being dead, you said, to the New York Times reporter.
“I’ve done what I wanted to do,” you said. “And that makes me feel fairly content.”
I sat alone in a movie theater in Haifa last night.
There were other people around me — strangers.
An American guy and a Russian girl out on a date.
Two elderly couples.
A grandmother, a mom, and her teenage daughter.
There were people in the theater, but I might as well have been alone.
It was that kind of movie experience.
The expression on my face moved in rhythm with the fictional couple’s tension and release.
I smiled.
I laughed.
My eyebrows furrowed.
My heart swelled and sunk.
Like the couple on the screen, I remembered 1994.
Except I wasn’t in Vienna with them when we first met. I was in Washington, D.C., sitting in a dark hall next to a good friend watching a free showing on campus of Before Sunrise, starring Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy.
Courtesy wikipedia
I left that movie theater in Washington, DC in love.
In love with an idea.
In love with this fictional romance.
This couple.
It’s pretty easy for me to pinpoint what I was so smitten with — the Ethan Hawke character was certainly the kind of guy I was into at the time. Intellectual, but funny. Confident enough, but still obviously insecure. Boyishly handsome.
But most of all, I loved that their romance –Jesse’s and Celine’s — was centered around conversation, connection, and culture.
This type of romance — not the kind featuring princes and princesses — was, to me, the stuff of fairy tales.
But how often do we get to see how the fairy tale turns out once the prince starts going gray and the wife’s eyes are underlined by heavy bags?
We don’t.
And it’s this reason why our image of romance is so royally fucked up.
Before Midnight is exactly the kind of film experience — and happy ending — we need more of.
“Happy ending?”, asks anyone who has seen Before Midnight, the 3rd installment of the trilogy, which finds Jesse and Celine married, approaching middle age, and discontent.
Yes, happy.
Real life, up-and-down, work-hard-at-it, happy.
Watching Before Midnight, we ride for two hours along with the couple through highs and lows during their family vacation in Greece — highs and lows not atypical of a middle class couple with young children.
As I observed Celine and Jesse, I could tell they are still clearly in love — or, at the very least, in “like.” They enjoy being with each other; they support each other. At times, I even found myself envying their verbal repartee, the ease with which they bounce off each other clever, but relatively harmless jabs.
They seem good.
Solid.
Until they don’t.
Midway through the movie we also come to understand exactly how very detached they are from the magic that first enchanted them.
And yet they long for that magic. You can tell.
There exists a struggle in each of them between wistfulness and resign.
But the fact they struggle at all is, in my opinion, a good sign.
Any couple who still wants the magic is a couple who can most likely make it.
If they work at it.
Before Midnight illustrates the work that is behind long-lasting love. It lays out in ugly truth how hard marriage can be. And how easy it can be, when you are willing to put in the effort and accept your partner … even when the person who once enchanted you is buried beneath years of diapers, laundry, or uninspiring monotony.
The couple’s dilemma and resolution at the conclusion of the film was better than any “happily ever after.” As the credits rolled, I felt my shoulders release and was overwhelmed with a sense of gratitude. Grateful for the gritty, yet satisfying, conclusion at the end of Before Midnight. And grateful that the idea I fell in love with in 1994 was one that could last. That could make it…somehow.
I sat alone in a movie theater in Haifa, and breathed in deep the longing I sometimes find lodged in my throat. But I breathed out wisdom and understanding.
ow and Martin might be trailblazers. Better coverage of “conscious” uncoupling than the ugly divorces we normally expect from Hollywood.
and yadda yadda, an aliyah blog 