destruction

(n.) The termination of something by causing so much damage to it that it cannot be repaired or no longer exists.

He found them. He found the journals I had written when I was young, younger, youngest–before I knew him. He found the journals I had written when I was dreaming. In the page he found, I had written about a boy who thrilled me, a boy who gave me more time to create him from my own mind than to know him in any sort of reality. I knew I would never really have him, was never sure I wanted him. I wrote then, so long ago, as if to contain my glee, to keep it safe and still to dream, to imagine myself, desired. I defend those ancient words–my words–whatever they were, now.

But then, after the storm, I found the pages, and wrapped them up, wondered where I might hide them first. I could not hide them, not forever, so I burned them. Words of my past went up in flames, with the letters to a me who was never good enough for my husband, letters to me hidden in a cigar box. “Te Amo,” the box spelled, words of love and summer and youth in that box, memories of me, testing out me on the world. I cherished that me, but left it behind, severed it from my body as if to save myself.

I look back, wonder why I let myself disappear, or why he wanted me to. They say this kind of thing happens slowly, insidiously, as charm turns to coldness and cruelty. That is the only explanation I can find, some sort of hypnotism. That is the only thing that could explain why I woke up one day and realized that I was lost.

My husband did not tell me when he had found those long-preserved thoughts. That summer evening, I returned with his parents from the movies. They came in, wondered where their son was, and left. My husband was there nearby all along, in the dark, in the high-ceilinged room where we had set up shelves, the computer, in this home-to-be. The boxes from my childhood home were emptied, and pages sat open. I knew then, but scarcely remembered what he might have learned of me, the me I was before he had begun to create a more suitable me.

My belly pushed on pants that used to fit, I felt the pushing on my skin, my shape, felt it change me as I knew the life inside of me. The pages were open, and my husband looked at me, me: disgusting to him, vomit on the floor, worse. He told me that I had no right to lie to him. I had deceived him.

Glimmers of forgotten scenes of our life together flashed in my mind. I only remembered them at times like these, times that I thought he really might leave me. A long-distance phone call while he was out of town–an old friend (male) set off a string of accusations (from him) and defenses (from me). His mistrust and lashing out seemed so unreal. Then, words softened, returned to the good stuff. That was the first time.

I never realized it then, but I was more careful after that, discarded the less acceptable parts of myself, when I could. Pieces still came through. I longed for music, music, and bought tickets to see Sonny Rollins. When my boyfriend stood up during the second song and announced he was bored, I left, too, looking back at the empty seats, wondering what I had left behind. My boyfriend expressed his distrust of reggae, Dylan, democrats and George Eliot; I avoided the undesirable (when I understood it), found other things, compromised, abandoned parts of myself to shelves that grew dusty over the years. I became farther and farther from myself, subtly. He disliked my old friends; I feared they might reveal the best of me to him, and left them alone, as if to preserve myself. He disliked my family, got me to see their shortcomings, insisted they never cared, not really. I felt guilty–or more than that, sad. He claimed that he was the only one who understood me, and after a while, he was.

My boyfriend was careful with me, and watched out for me. He protected me, and walked me home from work, took me to doctors’ appointments. He drove me to the store. I had no use for a car, and sold mine. “Good, we need the money,” he said, and we did not, but we spent it, on things that defined our love: motorcycles, car race tickets, things I never liked but tried, for him. My friends, my invitations, my curiosity evaporated as we drove off on some adventure together, far, far away from the world, in our own world, beyond the world. My boyfriend cherished me, and I married him.

My husband suspected me. The foreign men whistled in Vienna. I tested higher than he did in German. These things were my fault, my attempt to make a fool of him. But publicly he threatened someone, said it was impossible that I was better than he was, changed the grades. “I know how much you like it when they want you,” he lamented late into the night, late so I could never sleep, late so I could prove I loved him, and together we avoided night, Heurigen, Kaffee, blue Danube, Ringstrasse, and I prayed he would stop, fall asleep there where there was no way to leave him, I wanted to leave him. Men whistled, followed, and he mocked me when I told him I was scared of them. I wanted to leave. I dreamed of it, waited for the moment back home when I would pack my bags and walk away. I was scared, and then, I asked him to save me. He trusted me again. It was as if it never happened. But once in a while, he whispered a word, looked at me in a certain way. I shuddered, and turned away, but I remembered.

That night, when I trembled, pregnant, depending on him for my whole world, he found my writing. I felt myself drawn forever to him through the blood of a child, and I was. I knew my love, never strayed, gave up all I knew, my degree, my work, for the life of a child, a home, a family. I gave up myself to prove it all, so desperate I was by then, and still, he made a promise that day.

“You make me sick,” he said, first. I reassured, swore my thoughts were simply thoughts, tried to remember, felt my words quoted, twisted, rearranged into something I could not have been or said, something sick, something he did not want. I tried to explain, justify, calm him. Why?, I wondered, I pondered what I could have done, or not done, what I could have said or not said, what could have made him so upset. I swore I would never write another word.

“You could be like my mom,” he said. Oh not her, I thought. No, lonely mother, depraved–or so the in-laws claimed–not crazy, certainly not ill. Not her. “You could lose everything,” my husband said. He told me, that day, the beginning of our new home, our new lives, that he had to approve of my actions. He told me to behave. He told me that if he found out I was different from the person he wanted me to be, he would consider it grounds for divorce. I looked around at the stained glass, his baby pictures, my spoons, our lives melded together forever now through a beating heart. I looked at our lives, my love, and wondered who he was. I looked deeper, and tried to remember who I was. He promised that if he ever divorced me, he would destroy me.

I did wake up. Something in me was not destroyed, completely. He kept trying, though, but now, years later, he has stopped pushing me on the stairs, yelling in my face, threatening me in the streets. He has learned that lesson well–he was always smart enough not to bruise or break. Now he knows more subtle forms of torture. He steers clear from the overt abuse that bears witnesses. It is quieter now, more abstract. A letter from a lawyer. A motion to modify. An order. A statement: lack of evidence. Denial. It all seems legal, not out of line. He is upset, sometimes–who wouldn’t be?? I am so difficult at times. Everyone knows that. “No, she can barely hold herself together.” “No, she seems to jump for no reason.” No, she imagines things, the rattling of the door at night, his car driving by the street once, twice, the missing book, the coincidences. No one could believe the terror, the fear he can still inspire with a glance in my direction. No one could believe the loss and the pain, and worse, perhaps, they may believe it, and fear it, too.

Four hearts beat now, depending on the forces that brought them into this world. Four hearts tell me how they want to hide how they feel, and I feel the vulnerability in that desire to hide from the destruction. They want to be loved for who they are, and not for what they have to be to survive life in a reality that someone else imagines. Four hearts need strength, not shields: they need love to love themselves.

No, make that five. One more heart beating, not destroyed, stronger perhaps, even without the validation. At times I still feel the strikes. At times I still feel desperate.

But then, on second thought, yes. Destroy me. Destroy, (v.) Middle English, from Anglo-French destroy-, destrui-, stem of destrure, from Vulgar Latin *destrugere, alteration of Latin destruere, from de- + struere to build to un-build. No, on third thought, let me destroy the me that he created, let me take apart my life, block by block, wonder what might have remained if his creation had remained standing–or was it ever capable of that? Let me ponder what sort of creature it was that could love, even as it was being destroyed. Yes, I loved him once: destruction began not after the divorce, but far earlier, from the moment he first knew that I loved him.

I find myself in my own destruction, as I take a pen. I find myself again, deconstructing my heart, wondering what it was, that heart that still beats, that person, wonder, simply wonder why. And in that wonder, I rebuild.

n

backroads

Dirt road mazes connect, wind around mostly unmarked through the fields and forests, over hills and alongside creeks, erasing at least one barrier paved between earth and us. Friday afternoons after kindergarten mornings were our times for dirt road exploration. Little ones loaded for naps, sandwiches in the basket and a thermos full of icy milk, we could take any assortment of paths, up the Creek Road, or over the Common and straight down the Wylie Hill Road, on and on, turning at each opportunity for adventure, field of wildflowers, bird, barn selling fresh eggs, getting lost and finding our way back home again. Idyllic, one quest for what we sought from Vermont in the beginning: that is what those back road adventures were.

The other quest, one that perhaps matters more, was for that home, a place of belonging, a community. Oh, it does not pay to be a loner in such a place, where a neighbor plows you out in a snowstorm, or a stranger pulls your car out of the ditch, again. Pies left on a kitchen counter, sharing the berries that we couldn’t finish, noticing the light left on and the door open. Neighbors do these favors anyway, but entering into the exchange, being able to give back is the real reward, and it grows.

It seems so far away, so dreamlike, so obliterating of the real difficulties, so impossible. And maybe it was. For this was a difficult life, not in the lack of cell phone service and high-speed internet, not in the necessity of lighting a fire to warm a house, but in the travel for so far just for the basic necessities, doctors, groceries, settling for what could be done there –not much–when settling was not an option for a child who could not wait. And then, the more obvious difficulty: Vermont was not my land, never had been, beautiful though it was. I could settle, try, but in the end, it did matter. Suburban girl, I left Vermont and surrendered to a familiar life that wasn’t so hard, but not without a wistful, wishful look back to a dirt road and a chilly day. Life changed, after all, and the suburbs, PTOs, book clubs have little room for the divorced mother among the married mothers and those other women’s husbands. Community, believing in our lives, I live now among the disenfranchised, the immigrants, the poor, and it is here I fit in, here, where we need community the most and seem the least capable of achieving it–if only because we feel ourselves as outsiders, not daring to unite, when fear is allowed to flourish.

Perhaps because of that, I look for that old life occasionally, in the Chronicle online, in the news from a neighbor. She is finally a grandmother; her son, who was my own son’s age when I first knew him, is now the new dad. News may tell of a neighbor in the hospital, and another dairy farm may sell off its cows. And still, the same man is always the fire chief; the same woman is still the town clerk. And in a month or so, they will count the ballots by hand in that little village where I lived, full of dirt roads, full of hard work and hope… and sometimes fear.

This particular election has sent me thinking back to those back roads, the deer stands, the land and what it represents. I come from the Midwest, know the Wild West, had my babies in the wild Northeast Kingdom, and know cities here and afar. The ideals, the vision of what my country is and should be, come to me through these glimpses, sometimes good, sometimes bad. In the end, I wonder about the people of all these individual places, and what they want, whom they want, and most of all, who they are. And if we know this, know ourselves, what is it that truly unites all the hodgepodge of people in this nation?

In recent weeks, it seems that this question of representation has been simplified too often to one of superficial common bonds, rather than the heart and character that is the best of who we are. Does representation mean that someone looks like us, walks like us, talks like us? …or do we choose our president by what he inspires us to be? Will that person lead with the integrity that makes us great? What…whom will a president care about, and how will that person act when action is called for? If not as we would, will it be in a way that we can respect? Who will help that president? Who will respect that person, here and abroad?–because God knows our next president will need help, and he needs our trust.

It seems right now that our roads now are mostly not unpaved, but sometimes cracked, in need of repair, rebuilding, or perhaps entirely new ways of finding our way, and uniting our states and people–all of our people–once again.

dependent

When M. failed to answer the door, her daughter did not find anything strange. It was often that the old woman was napping, or upstairs and not quick to descend. A key turned the door, and all in the house was quiet. Did M. have an appointment she forgot to mention? Had a neighbor called? The youngest daughter opened the garage door to see if the car was still there. It was. And behind it, she found the carefully laid out cot, the empty bottle of sleeping pills. The keys were still in the ignition, but the gas had probably long run out.

The death was a tragedy, we all knew. M. was not so old, after all, in splendid health, we thought. It took a long time for anyone beyond the one daughter and her husband to realize that it was a suicide, and as it was, few people were ever supposed to know. The death by one’s own hands seemed too messy, too questionable, too unsuitable for a reputable family. And yet, the daughter who found her mother cold and inexplicably dead that morning said that she would have done the same thing.

Up to the time I knew of the suicide, M. seemed an amazingly resilient woman. Letters and other documents found after M.’s death hinted at a less than auspicious diagnosis, perhaps from a cardiologist. One thing was certain, though: M. had said many times that she never wanted to be a burden to her children or anyone else. She had enjoyed a high level of independence her whole life. What did life mean to her if she needed assistance?

A suicide must always leave questions unanswered, but the questions it poses reach far beyond the life that is taken. I was surprised to learn that the daughter so fully supported her mother’s actions. Her own pronouncement of similar suicidal intentions if faced with similar potential dependency cited anthropological examples of the practice of “going off to die.”

I was judgmental of the dead woman, hurt. How could someone I loved and admired not let the people who loved her actually care for her when she needed them? What makes life worthwhile? Can we even answer those questions ourselves?

Life can be intolerably painful in so many ways. I cannot imagine what for certain caused M. to end her life, or what I would do in her place. After the suicide, though, the context of the family began to make more sense, and I was out of context. Never being a burden seemed more a selfish thing, never allowing another person to extend a kindness, to serve a meal, to make a bed: not good enough, perhaps? Not thoughtful, but selfish. Always giving, but never receiving: yes! there is a selfishness in that. The familial stoicism was overbearing; pain, heartbreak and illness were impossible to discuss aloud, but were whispered in tributes to the character of those who hid their weaknesses. Bad things simply did not exist in that make-believe world.

Oh, demons exist everywhere, but they become dangerous when they are hiding. Everyone knows about the bear hunt:

“We can’t go over it. We can’t go under it. Oh no! We have to go through it!”*

Go through! Go through! Go through this life. Why hide? I want to love, and I want to rejoice in the real connections we have, the efforts we make, the love we give to one another… and the love we courageously take.

*From Michael Rosen and Helen Oxenbury, We’re Going On a Bear Hunt, 1989.