When D was a little boy he had a
babysitter who taught him that his manners lived in his pockets. When he would forget to say please or thank
you, or use a disrespectful tone, she would tell him “Get your manners out of
your pocket!” When we first introduced
manners to Lucy I disagreed with teaching her this method. I figured her manners should be with her at
all times. She shouldn't think they are
something you can just put on and take off.
They are a part of who you are and how you act, how you treat people
with respect and how you expect people to treat you. But before I knew they were introduced and
Lucy started pulling her manners out of her pocket.
Unbeknownst to me, other things
live in your pockets as well. Like
patience. I know this because one day
Lucy offered me some patience from her own pocket, since I had just informed
her I was out of my own.
Since then, the idea of pockets of
patience has taken root deep in my psyche.
I don’t think of them as something like an object in my pocket that I
can just reach in and take out. I think
of them as pockets of air, like oxygen canisters. Sometimes the air around you has enough
patience in it, and you are fine. You
can deal with the day to day, the minor setbacks to your carefully laid out
plans (HAH!), the ten minutes late to preschool. Again.
Sometimes a normal level of
patience is not enough, at least for me.
I have bad days. Days where
everything seems to go wrong, where the universe seems aligned against me,
where every decision seems to lead to a bad outcome. The baby wakes up four or five times during
the night, but still I manage to sleep through my alarm and wake up Lucy late
for school. We have an argument over
what she is wearing, breakfast spills
all over the floor, and despite my best intentions she is late to school with
breakfast on her clothes from being eaten in the car and her hair and teeth
unbrushed. Again. And it is downhill from there.
Some people can get through these
days easily. They have a family or
friends to anchor them. They have the
sacrament of confession to unburden them.
They can run it off at the gym or talk it away. Usually, this is fairly easy for me to do. I take a deeper breathe, pull in some air
from farther a field – backup pockets of patience – and say three words. A mantra, if you will, a saying that I first
heard in David Foster Wallace’s brilliantly perceptive commencement speech at Kenyon College
This is water
If you
haven’t read this piece, I cannot recommend it enough. I will try not to quote it anymore at
present, because if I do I might just end up inserting the whole piece. In fact, if you haven’t read it just forget
about reading this crap essay, and read his instead. Right
here. I’m basically saying the same
thing, and he said it infinitely better than anything I am about to attempt.
This is the
phrase that not only gets me through the comedy of errors that is life, but enables
me to choose my perspective when the universe seems to align against me.
Some days,
though…some days not even this mantra is enough. Some days, I don’t seem like enough. I
am not strong enough to look around me and decide that the universe is not
aligned against me. I am the center of
the universe, and I am being shat upon.
Nothing I do is right. The
laundry is literally in a five foot high pile in the guest room. No matter how much I exercise, I am still hungry
all the time from nursing and am
sweating around an extra 20 pounds of pregnancy weight. My body doesn't look to my eyes like it
should in my mind. The clothes I want to
wear don’t fit this traitorous body and the clothes that do fit aren't “me,”
whatever that means anymore. My hair is
falling out so much that the shower drain clogs several times every time I
shower. Every time. I am an awful teacher/mom. I hate working with my daughter on letter and
number workbooks, pre-reading and spelling.
I have no patience, and want to take the pencil out of her hand and
throw it across the room every time she gets tired of trying to write a “J” and
starts scribbling. When she comes into
our bedroom and night and asks if someone can snuggle her because she is
lonely, I want to cry “I just finished nursing your sister, and I am trying to
get back to sleep! I don’t want anyone
touching me! I WANT to be alone!”
I am the worst.
Usually my husband takes these
moments as opportunities to casually, yet somewhat inelegantly, discuss some
patient he had the previous shift in an attempt to give me some perspective. I will confess to him, tearfully, how awful I
am or admit that I am struggling, and he will ask “Oh yeah, the worst? Did you turn the house into a meth lab/lock
her in the basement without food for a week/give her a brain injury from
repetitive beatings or give yourself diabetes/a heroin addiction/a raging case
of gonorrhea?” This usually elicits one
of the two following responses: complete rage or a total emotional
meltdown. Basically, I will either throw
something, or dissolve into tears.
That is a bad day. But it gets even better than that. You see, I was born with a blend of brain
chemistry, a special mix that sometimes enables me to reach truly astounding
lows. When I am having a bad day I can
see myself spiraling downward, my thought patterns growing ever darker and more
convoluted. I look around me, and I am
totally self aware. I know my thinking
is illogical. I know my life is
incredibly blessed.
I see the water. I can’t breathe. I feel like a frog trapped in a boiling
pot.
I have said yes to every decision
in my life, and still I wonder how the hell I ended up in this place. A Bachelors and Master’s degree from a top
University, every family support imaginable, any life I wanted possible. In my thirties, overweight, pasty winter skin
in my pajamas at 5pm under a broken bathroom sink covered in filthy sink sludge
looking for an earring that “I’m sorry to say might have gone down the drain”
while both of my children cry in their respective rooms and my husband is in
Haiti saving lives and being amazing and all I can think is “please, for the
love of God, just STOP NEEDING ME!”
This is water, and it is killing
me. I am suffocating.
To some people, this may sound like
the most hideous thing in the world. I
live in a beautiful house, I lack nothing, I have two healthy and happy
daughters. I must be a totally spoiled
bitch! Well…what can I say? Maybe I am.
But I guess then you wouldn’t really be allowing me my own story, would
you?
As DFW
points out, and as we all know, real perspective is hard. It is work.
As human beings in control of our own intellect, we get to decide what
is important in our own lives. We get to
decide what has power over us, and over what we have power. We get to decide how we see situations, the
perspective from which we view our own comedies of error. I decide if the Mom in front of us at church
with the 10 kids, flawless figure, chic outfit and membership on the most
coveted committee was giving me the stink eye because I am wearing dirty jeans
to church (again) and my daughter has unbrushed hair (again) and is loudly
telling me that her vagina itches in the middle of the Our Father, or if she is
just smiling at me in solidarity. Or if
she has a nervous twitch in her eye from dealing with her own issues.
The point is, I know, when it comes
down to it, that I have an amazing life.
And even though he doesn’t always have to point it out, it is way better
than the patient D saw the other day who is addicted to crack and has lost
custody of her three kids but cannot break out of the cycle she is in long
enough to change her life. It is way
better than the millions of people in this world who do not have access
to clean water on a daily basis. It
is way better than one of the almost 300 girls in Nigeria who was kidnapped just for
trying to get an education (#bringbackourgirls). It is better than one of the 1,000 children D
is treating right now at a school in Port-au-Prince ,
90% of which are just recovering from Chikungunya. I know that my bad days are ridiculously
entitled, first world “bad days.” Most
of the time I look around, thank God for my beautiful girls, my total badass
husband, my family, my body that is healthy, and the amazing world in which I
am privileged to live.
When I am boiling and drowning in
this water, I guess what it comes down to is that I choose to stay here until
the pot cools down.
These bad days that I have are
sacred, because they are life. They are
MY life, the life that I give in service to my family and in doing so give in
service to everyone that we touch. The
mundane life of a stay at home mother and wife, the everyday service to my
family in an unending cycle of meals and cleaning and laundry and driving to
and fro, is the kind of freedom that only comes from loving people and
sacrificing for them day in and day out.
Sometimes it doesn't feel like freedom.
Sometimes it feels like a prison.
This is water.
