Earlier today I was telling Mark Mitchell that I have been considering giving up sugar including but not limited to honey in my tea, alcohol in general, and cinnamon jelly beans. Why? For the entertainment value.
He said Giving things up out of boredom is odd to me. When I’m bored, I engage in even more dangerous behaviour, rather than cleaning up my act.
I pointed out that there isn’t really much else on offer except, perhaps, taunting swans. Not exactly something that interests me.
Someone else helpfully suggested I address my current existential crisis thus: find yourself some nice football thug with a dick like a coke can and GET BUSY!
Technically there are no hoodlums in my general environs except those who live on Drunk Bench, and of course, I am too pure and innocent for such antics. Though that person does offer a certain underlying wisdom. Essentially, I am lonely.
The main reason I never talk about my problems is simple: my early life provided sufficient drama that I appreciate my current good fortune. I survived cancer, poverty, violence, and brutal accidents – what else could compare?
Unfortunately that does not mean I lack challenges, even problems that other people would recognize and sympathize with. All manner of turmoil has bubbled and oozed through my existence, especially since I moved to the UK. Did I talk about any of it? Not much, not hardly, no way. Some people heard scathing anecdotes, a very few others were allowed glimpses of grief (especially after the suicides last spring), but I have no vocabulary of discontent, no relative desire to share the burden of worry.
Why? Possibly because that is the honor code of my family. Perhaps because the early trauma required silence to endure. More likely because I am deeply private, contrary, and cryptic by nature. Beyond those semi-pathological explanations the even more basic fact is that I am, even when wounded, even in the darkest depths of despair, both a stoic and an optimist. I’ve always been a Hey kids, lets build a clubhouse! kind of person.
The last few months have been very difficult, but it is only now, in the last few days before spring opens up the world, that I can talk about it. Or, for that matter, allow myself to feel it. Winter is always a problem – I get very depressed, and can’t do much to build up my store of vitamins and sunlight without risking my health in other ways. Mostly I just hang on, and try to spend a few hours pacing around outside fully covered with warm clothes and sunblock. It helps – a little.
This year the problem was exacerbated by my longest ever sustained period of being a single parent. When I had my daughter I was still a teenager, and knew that I needed support. Even though her dad vanished I had my own parents, his parents, several sets of great-grandparents and cousins and aunts, friends, and housemates to help.
James and Byron were always around in the early years, and after I moved to Portland there was Polly and her menagerie, the magazine community, IPRC friends, and eventually the chorus. Being a mother is a solitary experience but I was never truly alone – I always had at least a designated co-parent, and usually a whole squadron of people who supported and loved my little family.
Even when I did not wish to access these resources, they were there. Even when I moved to a new city, the whole thing happened again, partly in an organic fashion, but mostly because I knew that it was a necessary tonic. Seattle has a reputation for being deeply unfriendly but I had AEM, Jeffrey and Tizzy, a different set of magazine folks including Yantra and Sal, the parents I met through AS1, and onward.
I’m not a friendly person but I am a community organizer; that is my calling, my trade, the skill the fairies granted at birth. England presented a unique set of new and puzzling challenges, Cambridge even more. But before I arrived I knew Sarah, David, Rachel, Emma, Don, Barbara, Andy, Karen, Iain. From that starting point I was introduced to a whole phalanx of other people, and found mysterious connections – people who are close Chloe, a woman who knows Ayun.
Of course a large number of those people are in London or even further out. And, as reported earlier, this year saw a vast exodus of Cambridge friends as they finished their academic work and departed.
If I have a crisis I know that there are people nearby who could help; Xtina, for instance, is a person I trust and admire who would not be frightened by the madness of my medical routines – something that I have to consider. But she is in London, so we do not share a daily routine. We can exchange email and visits, but we are not geographically close enough for the sort of casual intimacy that exists when you live in not just the same city but also neighborhood.
In Portland, most of my friends lived in the same neighborhood. In Seattle, Jeffrey was three blocks away on the other side of Beacon Hill. Here in Cambridge, this winter, I have exactly zero relief or support. Yet because of my previously discussed reticence I haven’t mentioned it.
Of course I will build up a new network of local friends; I just haven’t had time, and winter is never kind. Critically though, if I were simply alone, I would not even feel isolated. The problem I have been pondering this winter is the fact that parenting alone – without anyone to share either the good or bad parts, without any breaks, without respite or adult conversation, is one of the loneliest experiences I have ever had.
This is true even though not much has gone wrong, nobody is in crisis, and I emphatically love my children. They’re the best, the most entertaining, overall and completely my favorite people in the whole world.
Those facts do not change my latent seasonal depression, the burden of being accountable for all practical chores, or a hundred sundry other worries. Could it be worse? Yes, of course – and that knowledge is exactly why I normally keep my mouth shut. If only censorship were a solution!
Certainly I do not know what anyone could do for me, and I’m an expert on the subject.
This is a temporary situation for me; it will all be better in a few months. I am endlessly impressed by those of you who are single parents for an entire lifetime: you are heroic beyond measure.
Today I’m grateful that spring has arrived and that everything will change again very soon. New friends, new adventures, hurray!