Category — The Superstar Husband

Although I’m drowning in a pool of my own self-pity, which disgusts me, and then that disgust for myself renders me useless. And then I start banging my head on the fridge again. And that doesn’t help and it puts dents in my head, so I should probably stop it.

But I love you guys. You’re so nice to me. What great friends I have, even across the wires (and lack of wires). We’re also having trouble with our satellite wireless system here and so I can’t get internet in my cabin right now. Only here at the Big House.

***

Yesterday the YaYa Sister managed to perform a feat that I didn’t think was possible. She outdid even the time Kid A forgot which way he needed to be facing in order to poop in the toilet. Chinua and I were talking and we could hear her in the background, sitting on the potty in the bathroom with the door slightly ajar, talking to herself about pooping. “You POOPED!” she was saying, in her “big” voice, a voice that is hilarious because of its big smallness. “That’s so EXCITING! You’re so GOOD! YAYYYYYYY. You pooped in your POTTY!” We laughed a little at her as we talked, so blissfully unaware of the horror that was about to display itself to us. She hadn’t called for me to come and help her yet, so I just waited, continuing to talk with Chinua. And then she started crying and we ran to the door and!!!!

She had tried to pick up her potty to empty it, I guess, and then decided to set it back down, only she tripped, and it was flung, it was flang, it was throwed, all over the wall! POO! (Not solid poo) ALL OVER the WALL! And the floor and the trash can and just, well, everywhere.

I opened the door and then my heart failed me, I tell you the truth, I chickened out, and not quietly. And my Superstar Husband did the most heroic thing that I think he has ever done and cleaned it up for me. Oh, love. When your man cleans up the poop wall for you.

My life is amazing, these days.

The other interesting thing that happened yesterday is that Leaf’s shoe went missing as I was changing his diaper. I couldn’t find it anywhere, one of his little leather Robeez shoes, so I just stuck him in some other shoes, assuming it would turn up later. That night, as I was getting him ready for bed, I noticed a dark patch on his cloth diaper, in between the slightly transparent nylon cover and the diaper itself. Was it more poo, on the outside of the diaper? Was I prepared for more poo? But no, it was the shoe, the missing shoe, trapped in his diaper. I mean, this is like a soft leather moccasin, so it’s not like I left a tennis shoe in his diaper and didn’t notice, but STILL.

I think I need more sleep.

Last night we were all up in the building that we currently cook and eat in, getting ready to eat.  I had walked up with the kids (I believe that it is about one and a half city blocks from my house to this building, if you could measure in city blocks) and my Superstar Husband had stopped along the way to do something or other. 

On his way into the building, he stopped at the window to make a scary roaring face at our kids, which they started to laugh at… except that at precisely the same moment, we lost power and were smothered by complete and total darkness.  (After that, there was almost nothing we could do to convince them that Daddy hadn’t made the power go out by scaring them.)  My kids hate complete darkness, and they started screaming almost immediately, while I tried to get over to them to grab them. 

We scrounged around and found a couple of candles, then a big sack of tealights left over from the gathering.  Renee had made lasagna and apple turnovers for dinner, and we ate happily, illuminated by dozens of tealights.  It was dark, but pretty. 

The silly thing is, I almost never went anywhere in the dark last year without my head lamp.  Head lamps are an absolute necessity with us, as there are patches of the Land that are very dark at night, and at a Rainbow Gathering you can’t possibly get along without one.  I LOVED my head lamp.  However, at the last gathering I had lent it to someone (I think it was my husband, actually) when I left, and when it was returned to me, it looked like a horror film for gadgets, wires popping out, pieces missing.  Someone did a bad thing to my lamp. 

Silly me, I haven’t replaced it.  And Chinua didn’t have his, either.  So, the two of us were in the tight spot of trying to make it down to our house in fairly heavy rain, in complete darkness, with only three tealights to help us.  We had two little kids and a baby in a stroller.  It was not at all easy.  We felt like we’d made it into some awkward movie.  Why is it so hard just to get to our house right now?

Crazy thing, sight.  Without it, you keep veering into the bushes, heading for the pond rather than down the path.  You step into an ankle-deep puddle that you’d normally avoid.  Have you ever tried to walk by candlelight?  And then the rain kept putting them out, so we’d quickly relight each other before they all went out and we were left there without any light.

The good ending is that we got there safely, got the fire blazing, and lit a bunch of candles.  About an hour later, the power came back on, and Kai saw some lights go on in my room, and said, “What?  It’s not possible!” as he ran to investigate.  He was so serious about it, he had Chinua and I rolling on the ground laughing.

So anyways, all that to say: Tomorrow, I’m going to buy me a head lamp.

Yesterday we picked Chinua up from the airport. It was… well, you can probably guess how it was, but I’ll tell you anyway.

We left for the airport with PLENTY of time to spare, because, 1. I was crossing a border to get to the airport, and wanted to give room for any crazy border guard power/mind-trips, 2. I was traveling with my three kids, and 3. I couldn’t wait to see my superstar husband again. I have to be honest and say that one reason that I was worried about the border was because I didn’t have Kenya’s birth certificate. Which the officers on each side seem to have a problem with, for some reason. I couldn’t find it, right before we left, so I’ve been riding on the fact that my kids look enough alike that it should be apparent that they’re all mine. (Not that we look alike, but well, whatever, they’re mine.)

But, alas, getting to the airport early doesn’t make the plane get there any quicker. I’ve tried this trick a few times, and each and every time I’ve been disappointed, forcing me to conclude that it just doesn’t work.

We breezed through the border. The kids ate fine in the backseat, I fed Leaf in record time, and we didn’t hit any traffic. We arrived an hour early. Oh well, I thought, we’ll just walk around for awhile and look at all the sights. Like the baggage popping out of the ceiling and moving around and around on the carousel, or the people, (I saw a teenage girl wearing a burka* with a hoodie underneath, swathed with style) or the bathroom walls. Maybe we could even count the bathroom stalls and sinks a few times. Maybe we could wash our hands a few times, and then the kids could start to wash the bathroom fixtures while I tried to change Leaf’s diaper, and I could stop them and tell them to please stop touching the soap and then we could all crowd into a bathroom stall together while I used the toilet. And we did all these things, and they were all just as fun and engaging as you’d imagine.

Pretty quickly, after we started walking around, I realized that this walking around stuff wasn’t going to work, mostly because Kenya wasn’t doing it. Walking, that is. She was stopping, a lot more, and covering her eyes and stuff. And then maybe lying down for a while, and then pulling that noodle trick, that one that two-year-olds do, when I tried to pick her up and get her to walk, the one where they go all limp and you look like a fool trying to make their legs stay solid while they turn them into jello and crumple to the floor. So we found some seats. I gave the kids apples and they sat like dolls and ate them while I talked to an Italian woman who was waiting for her sister.

I checked the board. Only ten minutes to go! Time for the rice milk cups. What a good mom I was to bring snacks for the kids! The ten minutes went by with the kids sucking away on their sippy cups, and it was time to go and stand at the escalators.

And wait.

And wait.

And wait.

And say, he’ll be here soon, he’ll be here any minute, just keep looking, about ten thousand times. And watch for people who look like Londoners. That man, there! He’s completely and totally from London! Yes he is! But that doesn’t make your superstar husband come any faster either!

Apparently, in Israel (where the security makes ours look like a game of Simon Says) the security personnel at the airport had taken all of Chinua’s carry-on bags, (his computer and camera gear) apart to the point that he was going to miss his airplane if he tried to get it all put back together. “Oh, don’t worry,” they told him, “We’ll just ship it separately.” “My computer?” he responded. “Oh yes, we do it all the time,” they reassured him. It seemed like a pretty important thing to just be shipping hither and thither, but he had no choice but to board his plane.

And to arrive at the airport here and find that he and his computer had not come to the same destination. While he was waiting to find the package that never came, we were upstairs, the kids amusing themselves by sweeping the floor with their stomachs and whipping my bible around by its silky ribbon bookmark. I was sitting on the floor with my forehead in my hands. The Italian sister arrived amid much celebration. She was arriving in order to move to America, and her brother-in-law gave her a bouquet of flowers wrapped in plastic that was tinted to look like the American flag. The Muslim relatives arrived. They looked like they were Ethiopian or from another country in East Africa, and they walked around in a flurry of excitement and printed shawls that floated behind them.

The other people around me started to look worried, but we all gained confidence from the fact that the others were still there, yet as one by one the others started to trickle off I was fidgeting a little, inside.

And then he was there! Hooray! Kai threw himself at his dad and Kenya was in the midst of a happy dance when she fell down and embarrassed herself and we greeted Chinua with a swarm of hugging and kissing and wailing.

He’s home. And extremely jet-lagged. I am reminded again of how much God has given to me in the man who is my husband.

Our whole clan is going to be here in my parents’ house this weekend; two brothers and a sister and a future sister-in-law, and the mom and dad and of course all five members of my family. What will happen? Stay tuned.

UPDATE: Ephelba let me know that what I was calling a burka is not actually a burka. The women I saw were wearing long shapeless garments, with headcoverings as well, but they were not burkas, just a type of Muslim dress specific to their country. Whoops. Sorry about that.

 

 

 

Dear Chinua,

Do you remember the other day, the day when I dropped you off at the SeaTac airport? Actually, do you remember a couple of hours before that? When we had the argument? After you ran into a store to get a beverage (you always say beverage, and now I’ve taken to saying it, and I feel like I have such a nice, large vocabulary) and you asked me what I wanted, and I said, Coca-Cola, only then you came back with nothing for me, and you said that you didn’t know what I wanted, and I said “I TOLD you, I WANTED a Coca-Cola. But nevermind. I don’t care.” And then I asked you why you weren’t getting me my Coca-Cola. And you sighed and walked back into the store, and when you came back you put my beverage on the front seat, (I was sitting in the back feeding the baby pureed squash and rice cereal) and by the time I reached around and found my beverage we were back on the freeway, and when I lifted it up, it was a Pepsi. And do you remember how I said, “Pepsi?” And you said, “It was all they had.” And I said, “I can’t believe you got me Pepsi! You know I hate Pepsi.” And then remember how you sighed again and said, “I didn’t know that, Rae!” And then I responded by icily ignoring you for five seconds and then saying, “Oh, GOSH, this is disgusting. I know that I told you I hate Pepsi. I tell you that all the time. Oh, MAN, this is so GROSS. I can’t believe you don’t remember how much I hate Pepsi, and not only that, I KNEW that store was too small and that you shouldn’t have gone there. THIS IS REVOLTING!”

Do you remember? (How could you forget?)

So, I just wanted to tell you that what I meant to say was that I was sad that you were leaving, and I felt like I didn’t want to be away from you, even though we were both excited about the chance you had to go to Israel for a couple of weeks, and that I was going to miss you.

And then do you remember how eventually I got over my Pepsi saga, and I moved into the front seat so that I could lean my head against your arm? And then you leaned your head against my head? And we drove like that for a long time?

I meant to say then that I love you. I meant to say that we match. I meant to say that you’re the best friend that I have. I meant to say ten thousand wonderful things. I meant to tell someone else how I felt about you, and have you overhear it, so that you’d really know.

And do you remember how I almost forgot to hug you goodbye? How I went to jump into the driver’s seat, after you had kissed the kids?

I meant to say, I can’t wait until you get back. Everything is slightly less clear without you. I’ll jump in the van and drive away, and in two weeks I’ll be back here to find you.

***

It’s Love Thursday! Visit Chookooloonks to play.

I’m totally excited about the fact that the Leaf baby has arrived at the conclusion that six o’clock is the perfect time to rise and shine. It makes my day. You know, because I didn’t like getting up and having a little time to myself much anyways.

(Although, he is awful cuddly in the morning, and bringing a warm kissy-faced baby into bed is a good way to way up. Until he starts clawing at your nose.)

So, I dropped my superstar husband off at the SeaTac airport yesterday, and he’s on his way to Israel. I think it’s hilarious that he has ten hours in London, and he’s meeting our friend Adam there, and they’ll fly together the rest of the way. They’re going to hang out, but the funny part is that they’re going to the museum. “Why the museum?” I asked. “Because it’s free,” my superstar husband replied. We travel on a tight budget, we do.

We had a bit of a disagreement about who got to take the camera with him/her. It could be that I attempted to physically snatch it out of his hands, while I hissed, “It’s mine. You can’t have it.” I almost added, “My precioussss,” but I caught myself and in the end he took it. He’ll get some good pictures. I really wanted to show you the beautiful doll that Rebeca made for Kenya, with her very own hands, which she gave to her when we stayed at her house on the way down, but I’ll have to wait until I have a camera.

I learned a few things, since life is all about learning, on our trip.

Traveling with kids means driving past the good gas prices because you don’t want the baby to wake up since he FINALLY went to sleep and we will keep him sleeping at any cost. Even ten cents a gallon, that kind of cost. Even twenty.

Traveling with kids means that your son MAY act as if he doesn’t know you when the immigration officer is trying to make sure that he’s really your son. She may say, “Who’s this?” and point at you, and then your ornery son may shrug and hide his face, as if to say, “I have no idea who this woman is, or why she’s kidnapping me and bringing me to Canada.”

Traveling with kids means that one of your son’s shoes may become MIA, and for the rest of the trip you will not be able to find it. He will have NO clue what happened to it.

I also learned that it is indeed possible to go on a two day road trip and NOT EAT ANY FAST FOOD! We have overcome. It’s so tempting to just go through a drive through when you’re trying to make tracks and you have such a long way to go, but it really is possible! We did it!

I’m writing this just a few hours before we drop Chinua off at the airport in Seattle, where he’ll fly to Israel for two weeks. This week when I was thinking about love I came back to these photos, the photos of a father teaching his son what he loves to do best.

Chinua came by music naturally; he grew up with a conga-playing father and an African dancing mother. He started by playing piano, then one day when he was in the park he witnessed the portable nature of a guitar and decided, “I’m sticking to the wrong instrument.” He has since come out with the most beautiful music I’ve ever heard, acoustic stories, as he calls them, calling beauty out of the simplicity of a guitar.

Now he is passing this gift of music along, and Kai soaks up the love of his father as teacher like a sponge.

Happy Love Thursday. Visit Chookooloonks to play along.

There has been sadness this year. Thankfully, these sadnesses are the light kind, no deaths, no major sicknesses. But sometimes they seem to pile up, and they threaten to overwhelm me. I thought I’d write a helpful list for myself to mull over on a day like today, when it seems like I’m followed by a sadness cloud, tied to me.

1. Definitely, definitely, riding a scooter will do the trick. For a short while, anyways. My superstar husband recently had a birthday, and one of the things I plotted was a scooter ride through San Francisco with him. It wasn’t too hard to figure out, either. We were already going to the City for a meeting, we have an amazing friend named Amy who watched our kids and lent us her scooter, and she had helmets for both of us.

In my black leather jacket and big, visored helmet, I looked like a superhero from the seventies. My Chinua was wearing one of those little helmets that don’t cover your face, and because the helmet was made for a small woman, and he is a large man with plentiful hair, it was perched on the top of his head like a shiny hard Kippah. He was our black, Jewish scooter driver.

We zipped down Market in twilight and then over to North Beach, which is where we fell in love way back when. We had seedy urban pizza and then zipped back over to the Mission in the dark to pick up our kids. It was amazing, everything I had hoped, and even the fact that the idle was too low on the scooter, and Chinua had to restart everytime we were at a stoplight, even that was perfect. He was perfect in his shiny Kippah, and I held him around his waist and his shoulders and laughed at the dark.

2. Listen to Radiohead’s Hail to the Thief album. Sometimes it will lift your spirits just to be really really melancholy and angsty.

3. Talk to the Leaf Baby for awhile. He’ll make a combination of faces and sounds that make you laugh until you’ve shaken all that sadness right out. He’ll make dolphin sounds, raspberry sounds, squinch his eyes up, and wrinkle his nose. You’ll want to hold him forever.

4. Read Harold and the Purple Crayon. Especially the line about the “very hungry moose and the deserving porcupine”. That line makes you laugh everytime.

5. On that note, read One Fish Two Fish, by Dr Seuss. Go play a game called Ring the Gack. This makes you laugh too.

6. Listen to your silly husband in the car, people watching. He’ll say, “Where are you going?” to a woman walking by in a big rush, not so that she can hear him, of course. Or, “You got some foooood?” to a woman carrying a casserole dish down Market St. Or, “What’s in your little green bag?” to a business man carrying a tiny green bag with handles alongside his briefcase. All of this is only loud enough for you to hear, sitting in your van in traffic, and cracks you up to no end.

7. Laugh at Kai, surreptitiously, when he manages to say the oddest things you’ve ever heard. For instance, when he yells out, HEY! and you turn to look, only to see that he’s talking to his pita and hummus. Or when he calls out from the back of the car, “I burped, and it tasted like my yummy bubbly juice, and now I’m sad that it’s all gone.”

8. Buy yourself a new book.

9. Make plans for an upcoming trip to Canada. (Okay, so this might actually stress you out quite a bit, but focus on the positive: you’ll be in CANADA. Your home and native land. You’ll be able to hang out with your parents. And Becca. And Matty. And go to your brother’s wedding. Okay, still stressed out, but just focus on the road trip. You LOVE traveling. No, DON’T think about the packing or that the heater core is still broken on your van. Think of the Coffee Crisps. (In this link I especially like the part that says that “Canadian expatriates to the United States have long lamented the bar’s relative unavailability outside of Canada.”) And that air that smells so different.)

10. You would normally eat some chocolate or ice cream but now you are finding out that SUGAR HAS A VERY BAD EFFECT ON YOU, and that it gives you a FALSE HIGH, that brings you right back into the pit later. Too bad. Eat healthy things and feel happy about it. Think about cells being regenerated and your brain cells being replenished. (That’s the second time this week that I’ve used the word replenished, once speaking and once writing. I should work writing hair commercials.)

11. Mull over that scooter ride again and think about the time that you and your superstar husband rode scooters on tropical Havelock Island in India. Okay, maybe don’t think about this too hard. Especially not with that grey sky looming.

12. Listen to Kenya laugh. Get a kiss from Kenya, or a hug, or a touch of any kind, because this will give you great happiness.

13. Clean your house. This is calming and methodic.

14. Sing really loud at a gas station. This makes people look, but spreads joy around. Maybe. Depending what you’re singing and how well.

And a half: Drink half of a forbidden cup of coffee, just because.

My friend and employer, Ben, called me from Israel the other night, at ten o’clock. He wanted to talk shop, and because of the interesting time difference, it seemed like a good time: morning for him, just before bedtime for me. Obviously he doesn’t understand that my brain stops working after around nine, leaving the functions of eating and spacing out as my only options.

“Do you have time to talk?” he asked.

“Well, normally I would,” (which is true, although I may not be totally responsive) “but I’m actually on my way out the door.”

“At 10:00 at night?”

You would think, from my friend’s response, that I have no life. You would be wrong, I do have a life, a very strange and interesting and exciting life, but it’s true that I don’t have much of a night life. This is because 1. I am in essence a morning person, love waking with the birds and sitting with my little cup of tea and my notebooks and being perfectly happy by myself in the young hours of the day, 2. We live in a town the size of a much-used pencil, and the nearest town is the size of a less-used pencil, with no desirable night activities, 3. You could also say that I am now a mommish person with three young children, the youngest of whom still wakes up occasionally at night to cuddle and nurse and be generally pesky.

It does happen, though, that I go out at night. It was most common when I still lived in the City, but this past weekend a big festival occurred on my backdoor, and one night I had the opportunity to go and see the babe herself. Her show started at 10:30. I’ve listened to Ani Difranco’s music since I was a wee lass of thirteen, when I was awkward and skinny and tall and belted out “I am not a Pretty Girl” at the top of my lungs with all of my being. It practically saved my self esteem, the act of scorning the idea of “pretty”. I was more than pretty, I was, well, awkward and skinny and tall, which is much better. And looking like somebody’s Uncle Larry with my terrible haircut (don’t let cheap salon people near curly hair, or you may end up looking like Napolean Dynamite) and my large red glasses, is way better than being “pretty”. Not only that, I was artsy. Which is perhaps, the best of all.

So, off I ran to see her play, and I arrived at 10:30 and I met my superstar husband there, and we held hands and ran through the festival, because we could hear her set starting. (At one point something hit my knee, as we were running through the dark, and I thought someone had thrown a rock at me, but later, as we discovered that my cell phone was missing, I realized what had actually hit my knee and we had to retrace our steps. I told you that my brain stops functioning at night.)

The first thing I noticed was that she was holding her guitar in a really strange way. As in, way out in front of her body like it was resting on a large belly and she couldn’t hold it any closer to her. Was Ani pregnant? She was also looking more mommish herself than I had ever seen her, in regular jeans and a yellow sweater and nothing that crazy going on with her hair. (Except that it was purple, but you know, not braided or dready or anything like that) And than at one point she said, “I’m wearing my stretchy mama pants,” and the mamas in the audience cheered and I thought, wow, she really is pregnant.

It made me wonder how that will effect her music, her writing. Because I’m thinking a lot about my own art lately, how having children has both changed it and not changed it, about being a mother and being an artist.

Anyways. It was fun. I don’t agree with all of Ani’s statements, but she is a great musician and it was fun to stand there leaning back on my superstar husband with his arms around my shoulders like an arm mink, listening to great music in the cold and smoky dark.

And then to get home at 1:30 and to complain about being tired for the next two days. That was fun, too.

I was going back over some old writing yesterday, and I found a little something-or-other (essay? rant? written vomit?) that intrigued me. I love it when I write something and then it sits unread in my files for so long that I can’t even remember writing it.

I thought I’d share some little tidbits of this one, along with some thoughts now. It was written during a time in San Francisco when Chinua and my relationship was a little bumpy, partly because of my intense post-partum depression with Kenya and partly because our living situation was a little intense. We spent a lot of time taking night walks through the streets of Cole Valley, talking and being alone.

(Somehow I am only able to really see it (my depression after Kenya’s birth) now that I’m out of it. I was reading through my journals from that point and everything was really, really sad. The way I feel with the Leaf baby is similar to the others, but a little different as well. I am on the surface right now, and down below there is a lot of sadness, but I know how to take myself for a walk, how to sit and listen to God for awhile, rather than my own battle-axe mind, and how to smile and be happy for the kids. It is my gift to them. We will have peaceful and happy days together.)

A lot of the following is about disappointment, and the place in marriage where you find that you are no longer hidden, you can no longer even pretend perfection. It’s funny, after reading this again I find that I am changed. My marriage has changed me. I’ve learned a bit, some of the lessons that I was seeking to learn when I wrote this. I share it because I think it is common in marriage, (although maybe not everyone is as melodramatic about it as I am) and that losing their carefully crafted images of yourself is one of the reasons that people shrink back from marriage or even closeness with anyone, at times.

***

How can I describe how frustrating it is to communicate with the love of your life sometimes? It is like trying to walk in deep snow, or run in loose sand, or walk through deep, sea- weedy water. It is all of these things and more, because no matter how hard you try, you can never be quite as objective as necessary. There is no way to float on the top of this water, it is personal all the way to the depths and even more personal than you have ever known personal to be. There is no way to sit and talk with each other, listening to the concerns, without that giant, Fear, sitting and snickering on your shoulders, the fear that what the other is really saying, deep down, is that he doesn’t love you after all, that all those quirks that they admired in the beginning have turned out to be just plain annoying, that he has found the real you, the one that you have tried your whole life to hide, the one you hid so well. Now, after all that hiding, you are exposed, and he doesn’t like what he sees. So in fact, this deepest fear is about to be realized, that if anyone actually saw the real you, he would turn tail and run in the opposite direction, as though he had opened the cupboard door in the kitchen and found rotten meat and maggots instead of the chocolate chip cookies that he had been expecting.

And then there is all the “you said”, “no I didn’t”, back-and-forth crap that becomes crazy, that threatens to make you insane, when all you really wanted was to hang out for a little while with someone who just might validate your existence, what you have been looking for, validation. Validation in a big can that says “Validated”, no, actually, “VALIDATED” in capitals, because you have felt invalidated for so long that you need it shouted from the rooftops, you need someone to come along beside you and lift you up with the strength of their love for you, to hold you above their shoulders as high as they possibly can, so that you will finally be above it all. You will be able to see all the things that you previously never understood, all the things that you thought were your fault, but really weren’t. So why does it usually feel like we are tearing each other down? We have invested so much in each other, it has been one long investment, capable of such warmth, such purpose, but we often end up rolling on the floor howling, as far from each other as possible, grieving on opposite ends of the house.

It used to be that a walk would calm my grief, the grief of non-communication with the one person in the world who I really need to communicate with, who it might even be possible to communicate with. It used to be that I would take one step after another, breathing with steps, step, breathe, step, breathe, until I turned around running to find you, to find you and bring it all back to where it belongs, in love. Now I walk farther and farther, and it never quite goes away, this grief, it is sort of lodged in my throat like one of the pills that you can never quite swallow, it is in my own little grief throat pocket at the back of my throat. I have apologized too many times, you have heard it all so often that there is no need to run all the way back, it is no consolation to you anymore. Instead I scuff my shoes along on the cement and berate myself, and sometimes you, all the way home.

It is as though we have handed in the tentative story we wrote, and it came back from our English teacher marked over with red pen, words crossed out, circled everywhere, marked and graffitied beyond recognition. We feel as though someone in the hospital tattooed our baby before we even brought her home. We are so paralyzed with the criticism that we cannot find the way to rewrite the story, but if we could only revise, rewrite it, on new paper; it would be beautiful again, because at its heart it really really shines. Or, the image I get is of a child’s sky, a painting by a four-year-old. The beautiful fresh sky, rendered so lovingly with strokes of the palest blue, until the child’s two-year-old brother finds a black marker and writes all over it with thick black scribbles. It is the grief of the four-year-old artist.

Perhaps there are just too many things to say, and the important ones somehow all get left out in the sink to rot in the dirty dishwater, and I have never found the words to say what I really need to say to you. Maybe you have just found the darkest, slimiest parts of me, and now that I have opened my mouth and spoken them out, I can’t close it, and I spiral down, down, pulled down by greasy sea weed beneath dark waters. Maybe I am finally slightly honest with myself and I see how I set myself up for failure over and over again, until the word is burned into my ears, failure, and I can’t hear a word you say without hearing the devil’s failure mantra sung along with my name. Maybe I am desperate not to disappoint you, and so of course, inevitably, I do. Disappointment. I fear it more than any monster, any terrible plunder. Just the word makes me shiver with dread, I sense black holes yawning before me in my unlit path. If I am not who you thought I was, I just don’t want to be. I have the image, the sense of thousands of people looming over me, shaking their heads sadly while I lie curled on the floor. You have disappointed us so much.

I will always remember the day that I was sitting in Denny’s with my very dear friend, Trey, and some other friends that are like sunlight and sweet streams in my life. We were sitting, very late at night, and Trey, as usual, was drawing a diagram of the advice that he was giving us on a Denny’s napkin. We were in San Diego, amongst the salty wet air in Pacific Beach, confused and hopeful about our mission in this city far away from our home so far north, in Canada. Laura was probably jocular and beautiful, Dori was probably confused and bored, trying her best to follow along, but getting hopelessly lost, Carrien was probably thoughtful and intelligent, Heidi there hanging out with us, but longing for a cigarette, and I was probably following right along trying to be the best friend, the best student, nodding at all the right times. I remember the conversation as being about trying to extricate ourselves as a unit from the desires of the people around us. I spoke up, feeling very wise and saying, “well, of course you are right, Trey, but I think that we need to find a way to extricate ourselves without disappointing anybody.” I will never forget the way Trey looked at me then, and said, “Rachel, sometimes you just have to disappoint people.” And I’ll never forget how I looked at him for a minute, and then crumpled, turned to the wall and curled up and cried like a baby. And I cried because he had just torn down my one defense in life, that if I just did what I was told and worked hard and was understanding and agreeable, no one would ever be disappointed, and I would be okay.

I’ve always been rather good with my defense, and that’s why I can’t understand why it isn’t that simple with you. Why can I not keep hiding, why do all the disappointing and sick parts of me keep pouring out, almost gleefully, spitefully. Why has my last defense crumbled so badly? Why is what Trey said so true, and why never more true than now, with you, the one person who I desperately need to have this fortification intact for? You are, in fact, the only one who really matters. You are the dawn I wake up with every day. And so, sickly, you are the one who has pulled this wall down, and here I am unable to cover my naked self. My naked, disappointing self. And perhaps this has been planned all along, as though God needed to find a way to bulldoze that castle. You have leapt across the moat, skipped over those whining black holes, and found me. And I will disappoint you. You will not leave. This is what I don’t understand. To me, disappointment is the antithesis of true love, but to God, it is the test. And slowly, He is aligning me with Him, and my fortress is being built, crooked brick by crooked brick, on the love that can be tested, can be flung around, blown by winds, but stays nonetheless. It sticks.

On our way to New York City, actually. We were still in Canada, but planned to cross the border that day and head off on the photography lover’s roadtrip of our lives.

We were staying with my best friend’s parents, and her mom came barreling through the hallway and pounded on the door. “Someone’s bombing The States and Detroit’s been hit!” (Chinua is from Detroit.) With this garbled message in our ears we leapt out of bed and watched the footage that everyone else was watching.

And watched it again. And again.

It seemed like the end of so many things. After our wedding we had a brief two days of bliss and then the reality of what we are dealing with in life really hit home. People died. I couldn’t handle the thought of not seeing Chinua again, and I felt crushed with sorrow over all the people who were missing, all the lives that were robbed.

I remember where we were, and I remember how we felt, how I had a panic attack in Portland because the skyline seemed to loom. Many people today are remembering where they were, and how they were feeling, and their memories include losing a person they loved. My prayers go out for you. I’m so, so sorry for your loss.