My family has a Labor Day tradition – a trip to the shore without me, because to be blunt, while I love beaches, I am not a fan of sitting on them in the blaring sun. I am more of a rocky, cold, rough water, and sparsely populated beach person, which is the exact opposite of the Jersey Shore. Tradition dictates that I remain in our home with the dog, three cats, and a very antisocial and possibly blind lizard. I don cruddy clothing and pajamas and chip away at the layers of our house that come from living with three humans who cannot part with anything. In short, they leave, and I donate things and throw a lot away. It is my favorite weekend of the year.
This is why I am sitting in the dark at my kitchen table, the moon’s glow filtering through the skylight, apologizing to a parent whom I just spammed with things to think about for the school year, not realizing it is past midnight. I have five browser windows, three documents, and four email accounts open on my screen. I am bouncing between discussions with schools, lawyers, clinicians, my own teaching/caseload, a course presentation that is due soon, a creative writing piece that I can’t seem to push out words for, and a pleasure project that I am slowly hedging through that involves rewriting Sol LeWitt’s sentences on conceptual art for preschool (because OMG, it works. It. Works.). I’ve only been able to sit still to work on the above because of the satisfaction gained from organizing the garage and both kids’ rooms and 85% fixing the rusted ball joint on our basement bathroom sink stopper.
That was a very long way of explaining how one person in this giant world regulates herself during a period of deep sadness. I write this not because all is doom and gloom because it’s not, but because sometimes we need to acknowledge the strange mass of Vantablack in the room. In my case, that’s grief.
I tackled one of the messier spaces in our house a few hours ago – a small sunroom that holds an exercise bike, a few weights, and our PC and printer. It was filled with piles of crap – both kids’ unemptied backpacks from last year, random pieces of paper, baseball and Pokémon cards, Sid’s art supplies, and all of the phone chargers I have been looking for over the last twelve months. I emptied Emmett’s pack first, then scooped the playing cards into a box to be sorted. I pulled out unused supplies that could be used this year and paused for a second to sigh and lament that my baby is now in his last year of elementary school. Then, it was time to go through Sid’s things.
Sid has been away for seven weeks, and we are preparing for his next step, which likely will not be at home with us. I cannot express how difficult this has been for the entire family, and each time we get over one hump, another higher hill of emotion awaits. I am incredibly proud of my child and of all four of us. Healing – understanding and learning from how each of us communicates, tackling and sitting with excruciating feelings, navigating the should have / could have / wish we had threads of guilt – is really fucking hard work.
I had spent the morning on calls and email back and forths about my child’s future, and then took my seething anger at the American school and mental health systems and channeled it into cleaning out the refrigerator. When I finally went through Sid’s backpack, I was blasting music on the turntable because I needed to feel it reverberate through my everything. Plus, it can’t hurt to dance a little.
So, I was dancing on the gross carpet after chucking half-completed homework assignments and old candy wrappers into the garbage when I realized I was hugging Sid’s backpack. I had pulled the canvas close to my chest, my fingers rubbing the material, and the lyrics Home is where I want to be / Pick me up and turn me round /I feel numb, burn with a weak heart / I guess I must be having fun ran through my brain like razors of emotion. I curled around the backpack, kneeling on the half-cleaned floor, and sobbed. I cried hard and then hung his things in the hall closet and stood in the clean, empty living room and listened to the needle tracking on the record’s dead wax, the crackle of no sound, and thought to myself, did I just hurt so hard that I feel nothing, or did I open wide until the emotions completely filled me?
I’ve been thinking a lot about that irony of emptiness. A room can appear so full but actually be vacant; conversely, an empty space can be so full of memory. In these days of intensity, these moments that trigger the need to cleanse and organize and reorganize and seek sense and order, the fullness feels so empty, and the emptiness so full.
object of memory 