The us we used to know | Part II
On Love: How do you keep love from breaking?
This is Part II of the answer to one of the questions that came in from this month’s Ask Me Anything. Here is the question that was asked by Tyler:
In what way(s) has your relationship with Perry changed since the beginning of your pregnancy, throughout the duration of it, and after your sweet babe was born? In terms of connection, sex, interests, "free" time, individuality, working together on raising your baby, anything.
When I was looking through an old notebook for a blank page to jot down some thoughts for a new piece of writing, I came across the hospital packing lists I’d made before the baby was born. There were three columns, what to pack for myself, for you, and for the baby. I had “bring baby blankets” on the list along with pillows, towels, birth ball, and “treats for the nurses.” I had another list for everything that needed to go on the baby’s changing table. And yet another list of the items to include in his diaper bag. I didn’t want to miss a thing. But I missed everything because the baby came three weeks early and I hadn’t even packed the hospital bag.
We arrived empty-handed at the hospital — no birth ball or baby blankets or treats for the nurses. We had nothing but each other and somehow that was enough. For all the ways you didn’t live up to my ideals during my pregnancy, you went above and beyond during the birth of our son, and after. I labored for 20+ hours and you were by my side, holding my hand, my head, my heart. You stood the whole time; your feet weighted down by fatigue and your steel-toed boots, but you never complained. You gave me encouragement and quiet and compassion, and you knew my needs before I did.
There was a moment when we had to be separated before heading into the operating room for my emergency c-section and I felt your absence like there was no one left in the world but me. I remember the doctor counting down the minutes until they were going to cut me open. You weren’t in the room yet. He kept asking, “Where’s dad?” I couldn’t speak and even if I could, I wouldn’t have known what to say. I was worried I’d lost you at what felt like the beginning of our life. A new life. A new beginning. What a gift to be granted yet another life with you.
My hands were restrained, arms wide, palms up, like I was some sort of sacrifice. Maybe I was. But I didn’t care. I just wanted you. I wanted our baby. The longing was the color blue and I wondered if I’d ever feel the warmth and the glory of holding our son. Then you appeared at my side. You were crying. I could see your wet lashes behind your glasses. You held my shaking hand and sang my favorite song in a watery, trembling voice so that I couldn’t hear the sound of the doctors, the beeping of the monitors, my organs being set in the metal tray.
Then we heard the baby cry. Our baby. And you were gone again. I could hear you talking to him and you sounded worlds away. The doctors were closing me up. I was cold, everything was blue, and I felt like I’d lost you again. Why did everyone always leave me? The loneliness was eternal. Arms held open, but empty, carrying nothing and no one. Then they slid my wrists from under the restraints and put the baby on my chest. You were still crying, but the baby stopped the moment he felt me.
The joy came first — the all-encompassing world-altering joy of finally holding my son. Then the grief came after. It hit me like a barge floating across the river, slow and monstrous, carrying heavy burdens stacked atop one another in long rows, trailing waves of guilt in its wake. For months, I felt broken. And when I say months, I don’t mean the months you can count on one hand or two, but the months that stretch into a year.
You couldn’t understand the guilt, but you tried to help with the grief even though it hit you just as hard. You put your own healing on hold to help me with mine, to help our son, to help our family. I didn’t have to ask you if you were tired because I could see how full your arms were. I could see them shaking under the weight of our needs. I wanted to help, but my own were full and aching. I didn’t know how to be there for you. I didn’t know how to stop things from falling apart.
How do you keep love from breaking when you’re already broken?
I didn’t know the answer. But what I did know was this. I knew that we were lucky. We were lucky to have such a beautiful, healthy baby. We were lucky to know enough about love to raise our child to know it and feel it and live it. We were lucky to have known love at all.
Watching you become a father has split me wide open like a peach at summer’s end. It devoured me. The way you took care of our son in those early days of postpartum when I could hardly make it out of bed — you’d changed mountains of diapers before I even changed one, you knew how to swaddle him in a way that comforted him and I never could figure out what fold went where, you had this special sway, or maybe it was a bounce, that put him right to sleep.
Part of me wanted to resent you for being able to do so much for him, for being so unhindered, so free. Your body, free of scars, free of pain, free of guilt — you were so capable, so beyond capable. You were thriving. But I had too much gratitude for you to resent you, too much reverence. And I needed you too much. We needed you. And it was that same need that made me resent myself. It was that same need that made the grief catch in my throat every time I tried to speak. I was like a bird with clipped wings. I had the will, the yearning, the instinct, but I lacked the way. I lacked everything.
You never complained. You did what you always do, you did what had to be done. You brought your goodness to every sleepless night, every diaper change, every doctor appointment.
I remember when we were first dating; it was New Year’s Eve and I’d planned a party, one of the many parties I threw when I lived in the crumbling apartment in the marina. All my friends were coming, and I wanted to show you off. I wanted to show them how beautiful you were, how kind, and how different you were from anyone I’d ever met. The party was just starting when you got a call from your mom or sister, I can’t remember which, and their car had broken down on the way from Northern California to Los Angeles. You said you might have to go up there to help them. I remember thinking, but what about the party? Because that’s who I was at the time — shortsighted, distracted, constantly needing to be entertained, forever reaching for the escape, the release from reality. I didn’t say anything about the party because I didn’t want to come off superficial, which of course, I was. Instead, I asked how you would even be able to help them. You shrugged and said, “I can be there.”
Because that’s who you are.
That’s who you’ve always been. And it was your goodness that made me fall in love with you. It was your goodness that has made me a better person. I am better because of you. My heart, my writing, my motherhood — it’s all better because of you.
I know there are ways in which I’ve made you better, too, but I’ll spare you the litany of self-gratification, and I’ll just say this. We make a good team, you and me. We hold each other’s art sacred, we take parenthood in stride, we run a successful business together, we bring our strengths to each other’s weaknesses in everything we do.
I love where we’ve been and where we’re going, and most days, I love where we are, like that one morning when we were sitting at the kitchen table — you and me and our beautiful boy. You told me about a new song you wrote. You asked if you could play it for us. “Just the chorus,” you said. You were so excited, so full of light. I could feel you trying to downplay your joy like maybe the song wasn’t good, maybe it wasn’t ready to share. But you shared it anyway.
Pressley was eating a wedge of sweet potato and the moment your voice left your throat, he stopped and stared at you in awe. I watched him watch you, his eyes sparkling with wonder, his tiny hands completely still. Then he looked at me and smiled with his whole face as if to say, “Do you hear it, mama? Isn’t it beautiful? Isn’t daddy beautiful?” Then he looked back at you and rocked in his highchair to the music. I listened to the words.
“I just need to feel anything else
But I don’t have the time to hurt myself
I’m always holding off the war in everyone else”
The baby started clapping like he didn’t know what else to do to express his love for you. I’d never seen him so proud. I watched and I listened and I cried. Partly because I was so moved by Pressley’s wonder of you, his pure joy. But mostly because I heard what you said.
We’ve needed and asked so much of you that not only did we not see the hurting, but we didn’t give you the time you needed to move through it. While I was grieving, you were taking care of me, you were taking care of us. But who was taking care of you? I want you to know that I see how much of yourself you’ve given to us, how much you sacrifice, how easily you get lost in our needs. I see it all and I am grateful.
There are so many things I love about this new life with you, this life where we get to be parents, but there are things I miss when our family was two and not three. I miss the slow mornings when we’d have coffee in bed. I miss sex whenever and wherever we wanted to. I miss movie nights, my legs draped across yours on the couch. I miss date nights, our hands finding each other across the table. I miss long drives and roadside motels and sleep. I miss the blue evenings when we could work on our art and not talk but know what the other was thinking just by meeting glances across the living room. I miss spending long nights in the kitchen cooking together, listening to Sam Cooke and Billie Holiday, wine in hand, sitting down to eat after nine. I miss reading poems together by the river, in bed, on the porch, in the grass at the arboretum, speaking the language of our hearts out loud. I miss everything. I miss us. I miss you.
Goddamn, I miss you.
Do you remember that night when we lay on the floor together, listening to music with our eyes closed and our fingers interlaced? It was your idea. You wanted us to each choose something that we’d listen to together. That’s all we would do, was just lie in the dark and listen to music, together. You had a splitter for the phone so that we could each listen to our own set of headphones. I made a playlist of instrumental music that took me places I’d been wanting to take you. I remember that it was December. We still had our Christmas tree up and the room smelled of spruce and snow. We’d picked up a Rioja from the wine cellar in town — my cheeks warmed and my mouth filled with vanilla and plums. I remember thinking, this is all there is, and it is everything. It is enough.
You do remember it, don’t you?
Do you think we will ever get back there? I know we’ve tried, but we only end up pouring the whole of ourselves into our son until we’re empty. And when I need you and you need me, we have nothing left to give.
It all happened so fast, the emptying.
When I’d say I love you, the word love would echo back at me as if it were reverberating through the hollow chambers of my heart. I didn’t know how to love you when all I felt for myself was hate. I hated myself for the trauma our son went through during birth. I hated myself for not being able to fix things. I hated myself for not loving you in the way that you needed it.
You’d hug me and I’d cringe, not because I didn’t want you to hold me — I missed your hands and your skin and the heat rising from your body — but I didn’t know how to accept your love. I didn’t feel like I deserved it. I didn’t know how to let myself feel something that wasn’t steeped in self-loathing.
I knew then that I was not okay. I know now that this is trauma.
I started seeing a therapist and then we started seeing one together.
In one session, after saying everything we’d wanted to say but didn’t know how, you sat with your body turned toward mine, a tiny opening of the heart. But I couldn’t look at you. A chill ran over me like a wave and my body began to shiver — my trauma response.
The therapist said, “This is a chance for you to connect.” She was talking to me — my arms welded across my chest, my expression a stone wall. “Can you look at Perry?” She said. It took me a long time to muster the strength to turn my head in your direction. It was as if it was on a crank that had been rusted out by time. How long had it been since I looked at you? I didn’t want to look because I was too scared to give myself away; too scared to find out how much you [we] mattered; too scared to find that the we I’d grown to know myself as no longer existed; too scared because I knew if I looked at you then I’d find all the ways in which I lacked staring back at me, all the ways in which I failed you, our son, us.
I finally lifted my eyes to yours. A surrendering, to show you who I am. For a moment I felt a waning hope, like hope with a noose tied around it. Then the fear came and I could feel the hope flickering, dying out, until it all turned black.
Strained by fear, I asked the therapist, “What am I supposed to do with this?”
She said, “Just let yourself feel it.”
“But how do I fix it?”
“You don’t have to fix it,” she said. “Just allow what’s there to be there.”
So I did.
I untangled my arms, and for the first time since the birth, I reached for you. I mean really reached for you. I opened my arms to you with not only the needs I was trying to hold onto but also with the things I had to give. We held each other for a long time and we didn’t speak and it showed me all the things about us I never knew to ask. I found the self-hate and the guilt and the grief, but like the toadstools that emerge from the tree stump, from the loss and decay, I found a sense of renewal. A renewal out of the grief we both share. A renewal out of the love that has been there all along.
It was like coming home, coming home after years of being lost.
If you missed Part I, you can read it here…
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