Where to begin

The hour on D.'s old alarm clock glows green on my nightstand by a pile of unread lit mags and a Valentine's Day card that isn't really one but a blank-for-your-message Papyrus selection. D. has written in it in pink gel pen. Where did he even find that? I wonder -- every ballpoint, felt tip, and roller ball we've dug out to write Christmas thank-yous is dried up or nearly so. In the top right corner, in his tiny print, is the year. Before he met me, the keeper of family histories and their artifacts, he never added that to his cards.

I, too, have picked out a blank card by the ubiquitous overpriced paper goods imprint this year -- maybe to make up for this occasion on which neither of us has much more to offer.

There is no card for "I have a brain tumor and I'm sorry it is completely fucking up our lives" (D.). There is no card for "I am holding my shit together as best I can for you and the kids but I know I'm not doing a good enough job" (me). And we're not about to write those things in our respective valentine stand-ins. That would be admitting too much about the beating our marriage has taken in recent months. Okay, years. Illness exacerbates the things that haven't been working and makes them impossible to table indefinitely.

We are trying, in spite of it all. To the outside world, we are managing.

At this time of night, though -- last baby feeding done, late-night TV guiltily consumed in a separate bedroom, resistance to the arrival of the next day keeping me from sleep -- I know our efforts aren't even countering enough of the damage to make this a zero-sum game. The silence I've kept here, protective as it is meant to be, is serving no one.

In a few weeks, I will file our valentines with the rest of our letters to each other, spanning almost 18 years. I have not paged through them recently. I don't want to read between the lines and find the little fissures before they became cracks and then shear points. But leaving the card on my nightstand for six months, as I did last year, is just as much a reminder of my reluctance to face our history.

I never imagined that this was the life waiting for me, for us, when I started writing in this space, and that bears some unpacking. It's been too long. But I'm here.

Woolgathering

With regret, I set down a jumble of slender double-pointed knitting needles and gaze at the limited progress I've made: a one-inch ribbed cuff, the beginnings of an impossibly tiny sweater sleeve, in a rosy pink that calls to mind the columbines for which this particular colorway is named. I can't knit any further without the larger needles that are supposed to arrive today in the mail.

I haven't been able to knit for months. Not for lack of supplies, but from near constant morning sickness, which I'd expected to disappear around 17 weeks as it did when I was pregnant with O. But not this time. Here we are, well into week 24, and there are still plastic bags stashed strategically around the house in case of emergency.

The motion-induced nausea eased off somewhat around week 22, so since then, I've enjoyed being back at my needles in anticipation of this new little one, slated to arrive in the first days of January. But food smells (and certain foods) are still hair-triggers, and all my energy is in reserve for toddler wrangling while D. is at work. So I've been keeping a low profile.

I wasn't prepared to be so sidelined, given that my first pregnancy was so vastly different from this one -- I had energy. But for whatever reason, this baby has insisted that I slow down. Which has meant a lot of sitting with my thoughts since the beginning of May, of listening to voices I tend to push aside when the normal busyness of life keeps me from paying attention.

I had the chance to attend a weekend writing retreat on Whidbey Island at the end of May, where (in between nibbling rice crackers) I gave myself permission to put some of those thoughts on paper. Real paper, an old school notebook I'd abandoned after eighth grade and unearthed again last fall. I wrote words I had avoided writing, read them aloud to a gathering of 60 women on the last day, remembered what it felt like to crack open the stoppered bottle of stories that needed to come out. Found new mentors. Returned home with a changed sense of what I needed to write. But not how.

Since then, I've continued to jot things down on paper, something I never used to do. It all feels fragmented and dream-journalish, as if my subconscious is doing the writing. But, given the slowing of the rest of my life, it's also felt like the right thing. That is, of course, until the needles came back out and the months of yarn deprivation caught up with me.

I'm trusting that the words are still there, and that the writing is taking its time for its own reasons. But I do wish coming to the page could always feel as compelling as waiting for today's postal delivery ...