Life on the edge

I’m painting my bedroom.

If you know anything at all about me and painting, right now you’re giggling. Because … well, you know what? In this case a few pictures are worth well more than a thousand words:

What can I say? I’m a Sagittarius — a little too gung-ho to get started on creative projects, to get started on just about any project, really. I plan and I prep and I get everything almost all the way ready and then I get too excited and just begin and then I get too close to the edge. By which I mean I exceed my limits. And the result is colour on the ceiling where really there should be only white. So, when Sharp asked me to write on the theme of taking life “#totheedge,” I was all like, “Have I got a metaphor for YOU.”

This time, I’m going to take the painting slower. This time, I’m going to cover every inch of floor with drop cloths, tape all the edges, wait for things to dry properly, make good on all the advice my next-door-neighbour/former-pro-painter Holly so generously bestowed after I texted her and asked her for a “pre-painting consult.” This time, maybe I won’t spill over the edges.

But even as I type those words, I’m shaking my head and smiling at just how adorable and naïve I am, ducky. Because I already know what will happen, and so do you. Bet on it: there’s gonna be paint where paint ought not to be, and all the prepping and taping and waiting and good intentions in the world won’t be able to stop it. There will be spills, and smudges, blurred boundaries, drips on the ceiling fan. And the best I’ll be able to do is to catch them and sponge them off before they dry, cover over my mistakes, and hope no one notices. Most of all, I hope that I don't notice, because I'm the one who will.

I could hire someone to paint for me, of course. But I won’t, partly because money, partly because I kind of like painting, and mostly because this feels like the kind of job — a rite of passage, a ritual — that I need to do by myself. (According to my mother, “by myself” was my very first two-word phrase. I was a fun toddler.)

There are only about a million and three metaphors here.

In this post-separation world, I’m making space for my new worldview, imagining life going forward in ways that are radically different than I imagined it might for so long. Some of that is a cause for grief, and some of that is joy, and all of it requires a leap of faith that comes from clearing space, deciding on a colour scheme, drawing new boundaries and taping them off, and then getting as up close and personal to those boundaries — those edges — as I can with a paintbrush and the steadiest hands I can muster.

Secret underpaintings. 

I’m on the edge of a newer life here. It’s not brand-new: a lot of different colours on the same walls, variations on the same schedule, the same paintings hung in new spots (and new paintings hung in old spots). Different mattress, same box spring, and so on. Sometimes, I look around the house and it feels as though I’m in one of those double cartoons where they change nine things and you have to figure out which ones — utterly familiar and utterly unfamiliar all the same: those chairs are different, and that cutlery, and that painting is in a different spot, and that one’s gone. Oh, and you’re the only adult who lives here any more, with all the privileges and obligations and responsibilities and emotions that go along with that. Speaking of emotions, I’m second-guessing my emotional state constantly: I feel just fine right now, but what if I feel bad later? What will I do then? I’m trying to notice that habit, remind myself that worrying about future emotional states isn’t particularly productive.

But painting — that’s entirely productive. Painting is task after task after task, immediate and satisfying, an act of bravery and change.

New colours on old walls, imagining change and then acting on it. It’ll be messy, and fun, and maddening, and I’ll probably want to quit more than once, but in the end — with any luck — it’ll be kind of beautiful, and highly imperfect, and all mine. (Except for the seven-year-old who has taken to cuddling up for stories in my new bed on the nights that he’s here NOM, or the 10-year-old who likes to curl up in the same bed to read books or play video games. That’s good. There’s room for them in my vision.) There will be spills. There will be blurred boundaries and uneven borders and paint where it ought not to be. But there will also be new colour, new possibilities, beauty, satisfaction, and kids curled up on my new sheets. You can’t have all that unless you get right to the edge, look over at what lies beyond it, and take the leap anyway.

* * *

This post is sponsored by the Sharp AQUOS Crystal phone, which features a five-inch, “edgeless” screen that allows for maximum viewing with a minimal handprints (no painter’s tape required). It's also got great audio, featuring Harman/Kardon technologies, and a fab camera. I am being compensated for this post, but all opinions are my own.

Steal this book

That time I took that solo road trip, a couple of days’ worth of driving, crossing the border to meet up with my friend Mary in a city midway between our two homes for a weekend writing retreat. The plan was to make some headway on our latest projects and also catch up, get the back story.

Mary is wise, in this very inscrutable, take-no-prisoners, no-bullshit, occasionally infuriating, way. She’ll sit and listen to me utterly intently, her eyes narrowed in focus, as I go deep into all the tiny details of whatever situation is currently vexing me. And I’ll sift through each bit of evidence as though the facts will solve things, add up to the right next move. And she’ll nod a lot, and then she’ll say something Yoda-like, like “For me, loving someone means that I don’t want to change them in any way.”

And then I’m floored, stopped dead in my tracks, as I imagine loving the clerk at the convenience store, imagine the possibilities for all the love there could be. It’s a bit frightening.

I was anxious on this particular trip. I’d been anxious for weeks at that point: an intense, constant buzz in my brain that dialed up or down but never quite turned off. Anxiety left my insides knotted and uncomfortable, made food unpalatable or shot it right through me. I was losing weight. The act of being anxious, stupidly, make me feel even more anxious: I hated the feeling, the amount of focus it took, almost as much as I hated the situation that I (mistakenly) thought was making me anxious and the fact that there didn’t seem to be anything I could do about it. You know, the only person you’re in charge of is yourself, etc. 

I told all this to Mary in the living room of our AirBnB writing rental, explained the feelings and the people involved, trotted out all the tiny, apparently pertinent, details. And she listened in that way she does, and she related her own stories of being similarly anxious in similar situations, and then she said The Thing, the Jedi truth of that particular moment:

“It sounds as though you’ve given your self-esteem to somebody else, and now you need to get back.”

Huh.

How does one wrest back one’s self-esteem from its utterly unsuspecting thieves? Especially since they’re not really the ones who actually stole it in the first place? I’ve discovered that, often in these situations, the solution to the riddle lies less in finding a solution then actually noticing the problem. If that makes sense. In other words, the only thing I could reliably do was [buzzword alert] get mindful about it all: Lookit, how you’re doing that thing again? The thing where you let someone else dictate the tenor of your mood for this particular moment? You could redirect that.

So I chewed on that for a while.

And then our weekend ended, and I began my trek home. And I stopped midway for lunch at this charming little restaurant near the border. I had a Reuben sandwich, which isn’t really important except that the weekend had been filled with some very good Reuben sandwiches already and so I continued on with that theme. In the great scheme of charming restaurants, this one had shelves full of books to peruse while you waited for or ate your meal. I figured it was one of those places that worked on the honour system: leave a book, take a book, at your discretion. And so I perused, moving through fiction and how-to and cookbooks until I got to self-help. Where I spied this:

And I laughed. Here it was: my self-esteem, for the (re)taking.

And so, I took it. I hid the book under my newspaper, because really, I’m not sure that reading a book about recovering one’s self-esteem in public is necessarily the best way to recover it. (Although, apparently, blogging about it is. Go figure.) I wasn’t actually intending to read the book, although I’m sure that when it was published in 1992 it contained a lot of wisdom and probably still does. I just wanted to take a picture of the cover and text it to Mary, be amused by it together, and then donate it.

I finished my lunch, paid for my Reuben sandwich, got back in the car and pulled out of the restaurant and then looked a little more closely at its sign. Which included the words, “And Used Bookstore.”

I had just stolen a book.

A book on recovering my self-esteem.

And I was about to take stolen property across the border.

Do I really even have to detail the scenarios I imagined as I sped toward the border? Of being pulled over and searched, fined or arrested, never again allowed back into the United States? Do I have to tell you about the imaginary headlines that screamed through my head: CANADIAN WOMAN ARRESTED FOR SMUGGLING STOLEN BOOK ON SELF-ESTEEM ACROSS BORDER? The imagined video footage of me stopping at a gas station, surreptitiously shoving the evidence into a garbage can?

Reader, I was not caught. I made it home safe and sound, my crime undetected. Until now.

I’m not sure what the moral of the story is, or if it even has one. Next time I’m in that town, I’ll stop by that restaurant and leave a couple bucks in the tip jar. In the meantime, the anxiety ebbed. I figured out some stuff. At the moment, I feel like I’ve got a pretty decent grasp on my own self-esteem and a fairly clear vision of when I err in the direction of handing it over to someone else. It’s an ongoing project. The book has served its purpose and is going in my ever-growing donation pile. Maybe someone else will discover it just when they need to. In the meantime, I continue to clear space, changing (or trying to change) only what I can, only what belongs to me, and in the process making room for that much more love.

Two moms, two boys, two houses

waiting for the other one. it'll drop.

Yes. That means what you think it means.

Rachel and I decided to separate in December. Last Wednesday, the movers came to pack up and cart off what she’s taking to her new house, the place she’ll live full-time, with Rowan and Isaac half-there, half-here.

Between then and now, I’ve kept pretty quiet (online, at least) about the whole process. Too raw, too close, and — frankly — too private. And in large part it will stay private. I can say that it was a mutual decision, that it was and is the right decision, that it’s generally amicable, that the boys are thriving, and that we tried really hard for a long time and in the end concluded that it just wasn’t going to work.

And so, we called it.

Between then and now, I’ve taken stock, in so many senses of that phrase. What will stay and what will leave? What will I have to replace, and how much will it cost, and which of those items can even be bought? Where do I stand in this very moment, in the moment after that, and the one after that? What have I amassed, to whose credit, and does it even matter any more? And I’m hardly talking about money or things here, although I have talked plenty, too much, about money and things.

Between then and now, I’ve been living what I started referring to as a “half homeless” existence: alternating time in the house with the boys with time travelling or staying with a series of uber-generous friends, colonizing guest suites and bandwidth, feeling utterly welcome and ridiculously taken care of and also needy, tiresome. Two weeks ago, I returned from a trip (actually, the Mom 2.0 Summit, where I got to share this news in the way, ideally, that it should be shared — in person — with a crowd of online intimates, and no that’s not an oxymoron, and of course that was invaluable). And I unpacked my suitcase, and nearly cried when I realized that I could put it away away, in the storage closet in the basement. I could actually unpack my toiletries case, take my toothbrush out of its holder, stop using the travel-size floss and skin toner. I’d reached the point where I never bothered unpacking it — why bother, when I’d be returning to it in a couple of days? Yesterday, there was so much more space in the bathroom cabinets, the drawers. The grown-ups’ coat closet is now navigable, with only my stuff in it.

And all that feels in-between, the emptied drawers and cleared-off shelves at the same time glorious with possibility and yawning chasms of emptiness. Are half-full closets half full or half empty? It depends on the day, I suppose.

I am in transition, shuttling through relief and grief, waiting always for the other emotional shoe to drop, to take me from euphoric to despondent, terrified to tough, content to anxious and back again. “The sky is full of shoes,” a friend of mine says, and she’s right: they’re all up there, suspended, waiting to rain down and clobber you or even, sometimes, hold you up.

And, speaking of friends, have I mentioned friends? Because they are the lifeline through this whole process, the way they show up and listen and listen and listen even more, witness you in all your devastation and don’t try to talk you out of it, give outrageously and still manage to make it feel reciprocal. I didn’t know what I had, really, until this happened. I could go on, but I get choked up whenever I try to write about it and I descend into clichés.

(Speaking of choking up: tears are good. One should never apologize for tears. But still, I am — thankfully — well over the reflex of bursting into tears any time anyone asks how I am, anytime I mention the separation. Because although they are useful and necessary, tears are also inconvenient, and get in the way of conversation. So, cry, and then be happy to be done crying quite so much.)

I originally typed/dictated these words in the literal midst of transition, spending an oddly intimate day with Rachel as we divided up household goods. I’d been dreading this day for weeks, but we managed to get over a couple of initial bumps (there will be more; remember that sky full shoes) and made it mostly work. In some ways, we are so ridiculously privileged that I’m not sure I’ll notice that I have only three flan pans instead of six. (And here’s a riddle: Q. How much Tupperware is half of your Tupperware? A. Still too much Tupperware.) But at one point that day I looked at all the boxes piled up at my front door and something about what they symbolized caught in my throat and I dissolved into tears just one more time (shoe!), and she did too, both of us sinking down the hallway walls to the floor, shaking our heads at the surreality of it all.

I’m in between spaces, phases, lives, between disclosure and privacy, (co)dependency and independence, intimacy and boundaries, between celebration and grief. I’m literally in between time zones, but that’s also a metaphor as I ponder the next phase of my life as a grown-up, which of those empty spaces to fill and how, and what, for now, to keep clear.

“You’re in a liminal space,” said a friend to me — a friend who has also been through this — over a bottle of wine one evening. “And you know, it was always in those in-between spaces that I found myself.”

Come over. I’ll make flan.