“I just wanted to let you know” I had just unbuttoned and hung up our coats in the coatroom, lined our shoes — my big black clogs, her tiny ones — up next to one another beneath our hanging bag … my mind spun furiously. Z climbed up the white painted wooden box that allowed her to stand at the sink as I washed our hands with the eco-friendly soap that smells like oranges. The sunlight flooded the room, children moved from table to table with small wooden bowls in their hand, one child had set up chairs in the middle of the round rug — like a phantom bus — each chair behind the other in rows. The playstands were canopied with brightly colored fabrics — and a single strand of grapvine adorned one wall where a few hearts dangled.

I cleared my throat as the teachers came a bit closer — engaged in their daily work — something that’s a tenet of this school — that as the children arrive they be engaged in real work — and I don’t remember how I phrased it — a sudden death in the family, my husband found his brother’s body — I might have said that …it may have tumbled out because I felt I had to say it aloud to someone other than my mother who said “oh how awful. Should I send a card?” A card.

Well no, you should probably sit in the room heavy with a mother’s grief and mother to mother, hold her there. But, in the event that pre-arranged plans with your partner to travel to your house up north intervene…by all means. A card. She sent a plant instead.

So I don’t know what I said exactly except that with the session starting again soon that would take us into Spring that I had much on my mind already — worried for my friend, and now. There is so much more to the story I can’t write of right now but I can tell you that the teacher looked at me with such kindness and said I was welcome to bring my life to the table with the other mothers –and I said “but this such a beautiful and sunny place…and to bring such darkness here” which, at the time, I meant the things that had unfolded — the death and the fear — and what I fear for my husband having stumbled into something that we both suspected he might that night when all the signs were there … but when I thought about it later I also thought how it felt a desecration — to talk of such things in such a place with the lightness of children’s spirits — and then I thought again about my own life and how I’d said to a friend that this is one of those times that i feel marked, damaged — because as truly awful as this is, and it is, these happenings unfold in my mind’s eye a million times a day — in some dark recess I can’t truly access and that few know exist in me — shaped as it was by those early years — and so it seems if not a day to day occurrence — a possible one — in the world I’ve come to know.

I thought again about the sunny lives of those children in the room, mine among them — and how I wanted so much for her to be untouched by the darkness of life — knowing that’s impossible, of course, but wanting it nonetheless.

A sunny life where no one dies unexpectedly, alone — where no one leaves behind boxes of defaulted insurance policies and meaningless receipts — where no one carries the heavy weight of grief wondering whether or not their love could have changed someone — had they connected more, asked more questions, been a better mother, son, daughter, lover, sister, brother, friend.

My father died on February 17th, 1978 and so, this year, amidst it all… it went nearly unremarked.

He was 52, a former ultra-marathoner and contract tech writer who loved traveling to Thailand.  He had few friends, no partner and today we sifted through the remnants of his life.

Life is surreal sometimes.

And then I realized that the wonderfully charitable, funny and whipsmart Jjiraffe had linked to me.  It has really been through the inspiration of finding these new connections through blogging that I’ve begun to write again — thanks to Esperanza and Jjiraffe and that bay area contingent; I nearly died with jealousy when I realized you guys knew one another IN REAL LIFE…and had dinner with MOUSTACHES. (If you read Jjiraffe’s blog that line will totally make sense.)

At any rate I’d like to put up another What It’s Like Here  sometime in the next few weeks — but I wanted to include a link to the previous one which includes the blogs who participated — let me know if I missed someone.

What It’s Like Here.

 I wish I’d been in time for her handwriting meme –but of course I managed to catch up just in time for “What’s Your Funeral Song?”

Recently, appropos of what I have no idea, G. and I were talking about funerals.  G. is not a religious man in any sense of the word — if anything nature is his place of worship — in the wild places we’ve walked and in being alone in it.  When I think of him most at peace its in thinking of him in the woods and on the waters he loves.  We don’t get enough of it living as we do in the outskirts of a major city.  We’ve made a series of narrowing choices that have resulted in the kind of life that would be familiar to most Americans as a kind of midwestern American dream — and while I can say that I never believed I’d have it  – I still yearned for it when I saw it in others lives when I was a child — you know, the neatly folded piles of laundry scented with dryer sheets, the stocked pantry, the expectation that there would be family vacations and that these would be by plane … soccer fields and lacrosse fields and hockey rinks — and all of the places our lives have unfolded in these last years as W has entered (and in a short year will leave) his tweens. As an adult I fashioned another life entirely made out of what I’d come to think of as my life’s path  – think of a mountainous University town, old ramshackle hundred year-old houses with warped floors, faded prayer flags, pot-luck suppers, local readings at the bar where cowboys still two-stepped on Saturday night pushing aside all the young college hipster punks.  I made my life in places where trailheads were a walk away and immersion in truly wild places was less than half a day’s drive.  And then I fell in love and all bets were off.  The reality, of course, is that if things were different — had G and I met at a different time in life — he would have been gloriously happy in that small University town in the mountains — fishing the Blackfoot after work…hiking those trails together.  It’s that life unlived that unfolded in some other alternative universe — and while we have such wonderful gifts here in this life — it’s one that we feel beholden to — he’s trapped on a treadmill in work he tolerates, but doesn’t love and is made bearable only by the fact that he runs his own business; we always said that when W graduated from high school that we’d be free to start over… move farther north  – but I suppose the reality is that you put down roots and you deepen your connections and well, you age — and in six and a half years (how can it be so soon?) I’ll be almost forty six and G will be fifty-two  – Z will be eight … it certainly isn’t like packing everything in your Subaru and moving to that next best place when you’re twenty-three. As for me, well I’m beginning to make peace with the fact that I simply have to delegate more — accept my mother’s offers to watch Z, approach my MIL who does love to be with her … and those hours I can then have to myself in an attempt to reclaim the tiniest bit of self.  I don’t think at this point that I can reasonably return to creative work — not the kind of writing I’d like to do — but I made a promise recently not to abandon it –but to keep it hovering out there at the ready — to be picked up again when there is time — and so that’s what I’ve told myself.

Anyway.  How did I get here? I was talking about G and how he isn’t particularly religious — or even spiritual … he’s a pragmatist and an intellectual and while he respects my own relationship to spiritual questioning he’s not really susceptible to the same inclinations and so whatever community of faith I might seek out he would never choose to be a part of it — we were talking, most likely in light of my friend’s diagosis, his good friend’s death last year — we were talking about funerals and he said that he wanted Ryan Adams played at his … he wanted this song:

I wanna go to Magnolia Mountain
And lay my weary head down
Down on the rocks
Of the mountain my savior made
Steady my soul and ease my worry
Hold me when I rattle like a hummingbird hummin’
Tie me to the rocks of the mountain my savior made

Lie to me
Sing me a song
Sing me a song until the morning comes
If the morning come, will you lie to me
Will you take me to your bed
Will you lay me down
Til’ I’m heavy like the rocks in the riverbed
That my savior made

I wanna be the bluebird singing
Singing to the roses in her yard
Roses in her yard her father grew for her
It’s been raining like Tennessee honey
So long I got too heavy to fly
Ain’t no bluebird ever gets too heavy to sing

Lie to me
Sing me a song
Sing me a song until the morning comes
And if the morning don’t come, will you lie to me
Will you take me to your bed
Will you lay me down
Ti’l I’m heavy like the rocks in the riverbed
That my savior made
. . . please

We burn the cotton fields down in the valley
And ended up with nothing but scars
Scars became the lessons that we gave to our children after the war
There ain’t nothing but the [truth/tunes] of Magnolia Mountain
Where nobody ever dies
Steady your soul and ease your worry
They got room

Lie to me like I lie to you
Hold me down until the morning comes
And if the morning don’t come
Will you lie to me
Will you take me to your bed
Will you lay me down
Ti’l I’m heavy like the rocks in the riverbed
That my savior made
. . . please

***

He’s right.

It’s the perfect song.

And maybe that’s how I know we’re meant for one another.

This post was prompted by Eden’s meme — but it’s come at a peculiar time.  My best friend has begun a very intense drug trial for her mbc.  I find my thoughts are hard to corral — about everything — Z is still adjusting to school and the other things I take her to in an attempt to make her more comfortable in social situations (and as I result  I get tapped out because I, like her, would much rather ‘ssttaayyy hoooome’ which is how she so plaintively puts it when I remind her we’re off to music class, or school, or the library or whatever…); things with my mother are much the same, she’s watched Z after I asked her and it went well but things between us are pleasant, but distant; W is having some trouble that I don’t want to go into here — it’s nothing awful, but it’s emblematic of tween-hood and blended families, and W’s particular nature — and it is hard and makes me question all the more the role of technology in our lives and our children’s lives; my friend is battling and witnessing her journey through this illness as well as my own reaction to it has been illuminating.  I realize we all choose how much we let people in — and I’ve realized through these months what a gift it is when we let people into our lives, allow them to help us, care for us, be with us.  I’m not very good at it — I isolate and always have.

I wrote a tweet today that remarked on the fact that I read the results of the previous round of this trial she’s on — and I shouldn’t have.  They were dire.  My mind can’t really wrap around the information it keeps bumping up against and I keep thinking it’s all a terrible mistake and this, this will be a miracle.

I was,  am a relative newcomer to Susan’s blog — a blog that began to chronicle her journey to motherhood — and then became a blog about advocacy for women with breast cancer — and to raise awareness concerning inflammatory breast cancer — a cancer that presents without a lump — the cancer that she lived with and survived and wrote about for five years — and was so gracious to share her journey with us. Susan’s blog was recommended to me after my friend’s metastasis diagnosis this past September — it was through Susan’s blog that I got the idea for the love quilt — it was Susan’s blog I returned to when I wanted to know how I might help my friend.

Susan died yesterday. Her blog is here should you wish to visit it — but even bettter are her words, posted here — I have taken it so much to heart since I first read them…and I cannot think of a better tribute to her life than to honor her words.

What you believe matters, however. It’s all anyone has to act on. And since what you do is who you are, your actions define you. If you don’t believe anything is true simply because you can’t logically prove what’s true, you won’t do anything. You won’t be anything. You’ll end up spending your life in a rockign chair looking out at the horizon waiting for an answer that never comes.- From Russell Banks Lost Memory oF Skin

I’ve always devoured books. As a child and young adult I would dive into them and barely resurface because, after all, what was there to come up for? I try, sitting in my pretty suburban home, to conjure up those days and years of childhood but the individual days are lost to me and what stands out, usually — are the particular heartbreaks and terrors — and what I gloss over are the moments sitting in the dark at the city’s children’s theater — for our city is famous for its arts — and how it all thrilled me — the smell of the sets and the lights and the music — sitting on the velvet chairs in the dark — and how, for a short time, I danced ballet there in the wide, wood–planked room filled with mirrors and how each girl would come with her bag — as if they were professionals — and I see now that they were, in a sense — my mother would pull me out of ballet — just as she’d pull me out of riding lessons and abandon the guitar lessons given in the Lutheran church basement down the street from my elementary school after one particularly humid, indian-summer day when the glue holding the broken neck of the guitar came twanging apart in my hands and my mother never bothered to get another — and if she asked me if I wanted to continue I imagine I did what I always did which was search her face for the answer she wished me to give — because it was always easier to give the answers she wanted to hear — more painful for me than her own anger or frustration AT me — was her frustration when faced with the inability to make things better for me — and so it was better to want nothing at all.

I just finished Russell Banks newest novel — and from the moment I began it I knew it was exactly the kind of writing I wanted to read at the moment — and I fell into the book — a disturbing book to be sure. While its explicit in ways that are difficult to read I found it brilliant in the way it poses questions about our growing reliance on digital media and images — and how the ways we measure ourselves and others are inextricably bound to this false commodification of people and things — to the point where we have dehumanized ourselves… it gave me pause because I thought of the harmless time-wasting I do on the internet — how once I considered it a guilty pleasure to read People — but now would click onto a variety of celebrity fueled snarky sites — and consume it — as if these celebrities were not real … as if they couldn’t, somehow, be touched by the viciousness of the content — why– because of their visibility? Their money? Their perceived physical flawlessness when a chink was found — that soft spot in the armor that the writer then amplified and came back to time and time again — a bit of flesh here, a dark circle there — and I would have thought it mostly harmless and then read this book and stepped back to ask myself what my own role was in this world that subtly feeds us two-dimensional versions of reality — asking us to believe it to be entertainment and therefore we’re free to be so callous with it — when all the pixels dissolve and reconfigure there is a person behind there — with a history and heartbreak and fears that wants nothing more than what we all want — which is to be seen and not shunned — to be a part of — rather than separate from…

The other thing the book made me reflect on was benign neglect — or not so benign — the main character in this book is raised by a single mother whose life has provided her with a narrow set of choices and worldview and so she’s limited in what she offers her son — and what she does offer is a complete and total lack of boundaries — and though she goes through all of the checklist of goodnight kisses and clothing and feeding him — the neglect is profound. I squirm often when there’s a book about single parents — or the representation of a single mother — I think back on when I thought I might write a memoir and I was at a conference and a famous editor explained to me that I had to imagine myself as a character and tell that narrative — could I step outside of myself enough to create it … and I suppose that’s what happens when I read a book like Banks’ latest — I start imagining my own narrative — in this book his mother was a hairdresser who spent most nights out with her work girl friends — trolling the bars — and though my mother, in the years she was employed, held a serious of white-collar jobs– she too spent the hours after work with her girlfriends ‘having drinks’ — and I remember the man she dated for ten years off and on — and though he never stayed at our house I think my mother stayed at his — and certainly once I was in high school and was out with my friends she was free to do as she wished and most likely did. I had very little home culture — I mean, my mother would always make certain we ate dinner at the table — and she probably inquired in some small way about school — but she could barely surface above her own depression — I see that now. I think about how when I was to graduate high school — and my brother came into town and was bringing his partner with him — a doctor from Harvard — and how affronted my mother was that my brother covered all the furniture with sheets and spent two days before anyone arrived painting the apartment walls — because, of course, they were dingy with her years of smoking — and there was a settling crack in the living room ceiling that went un-repaired — and I can’t think of those years without wondering how it is that my mother never owned a plastic garbage pail for under the sink — I felt so privileged when G and I moved into this house and I had a pull out drawer that held two — TWO — plastic bins — one for garbage and one for recycling — and then slid slowly back on their runners with their cherry wood facades and shiny brushed steel knobs — and how for years the under the sink cabinet of my mother’s never closed true — you had to wedge a piece of paper between the door and jamb to get it to close — otherwise it would swing open revealing the brown grocery bag soaked with coffee grounds and cigarette butts — the very thought of which makes me gag now –for the nearly eight years I lived there with her she couldn’t get a garbage pail?

Those things.

My mother came to watch Z last week while I had lunch with my friend. I was desperate and understood that I had to see A (my friend) before she went to the hospital for treatment — and I’d never asked my mother — not since Z was six months old — to stay even an hour alone with her. They did wonderfully — Z loved it and her — my mother seemed thrilled to be asked — but there’s the weight of our history around the entire thing — all of the unsaid things — and said things that are simply ignored. My mother, for instance, refuses to acknowledge that we bought a cabin — nevermind it was a lifelong dream of G’s and mine — nevermind how wonderful it is and will be for the kids — for her all it represents is a rejection of her house — a place that we used for many years while W was growing up (and stopped going after W was about 8 and she had too much to drink and there was a series of uncomfortable scenes — first with W because she was wearing a sweatshirt of his (sizes too big for him) and we were standing by the fire roasting marshmallows — and she made some remark that was supposed to be teasing — and then again — and amplified her voice and menacing face — not that it was particularly scary to him — just weird — and then later, after I’d gone to bed, between her and G regarding what she felt was a mismanagement of W (she the one who could never get dinner to the table until 9 because she was ‘continental’ — god forbid an 8 year old who usually eats no later than 6 get crabby and sleepy)– nothing horrible — just the things that happen when you are held hostage to someone’s drinking and they are going through the world like they don’t have a problem — anyway. We stopped going with the exception of an occasional obligatory visit in the summer. My mother thought she might live there full time but lives with her partner in her partner’s little bungalow in the city and so it stands vacant much of the time and my mother is given to sighing deeps sighs that no one can travel with her. My mother would have been happiest with an entourage. There are times when I am deeply uncomfortable with the pattern I can see in retrospect — that my absence in my mother’s life was filled by her partner — that all those years of childhood and young adulthood my role was that of constant companion — recently when we fought I said something about how she’d abandoned me and she pulled out some tired line about how “when you left for college I lost my best friend” — when I should have been her daughter for christ’s sake — but it left me without any ability to know my own heart because I was simply to be a mirror to her — years later when I would enter therapy for a near suicidal depression and anxiety part of the cognitive therapy routine was sussing out what it was that I was FEELING…and let me tell you — oftentimes I had no earthly idea what I was feeling — so disconnected was I from my own emotions.

All of this triggered from reading a book — no wonder there are times in my life when I’ve avoided reading.

Impossible not to reflect on anyway– raising children. There is protection in guarding them from the very real facts of your life and your complicated heart. I haven’t given much thought to it recently but there will come a time when Z will want to know things — about her grandfather — about my life with my mother — about her grandmother — and there’s much I want to protect her from — but nothing I wish to lie about — it seems like such a fine line.

I keep telling myself that my mother did the best she could — and she did. My mother was abandoned by her own mother — dumped with her grandmother at the age of three and left to run wild in a household of cousins and other dumped children in the suburbs of Detroit — when my grandmother snagged herself a husband she came to retrieve her daughter — my mother was 8 — and the new husband adopted my mother legally — one of her heartbreaking childhood stories tells of a third grade teacher who refused to believe she’d been adopted and said to her “you were born ________, you will always be ___________” — and it might very well be my mother’s mantra as she never believed herself to belong anywhere — always felt she had to be on her best behavior –and, I suspect, that she was something shameful of her mother’s that the rest of the family had to endure belonging, as she did, to a different time when my grandmother was married, not to the would be someday head counsel of big car company — but to a Berkeley tool and die man who liked to drag race down Woodward and drank too much would leave her for a sixteen year-old and take off for Florida. My mother would work very hard on perfecting the facade of the perfect suburban upper-middle class girl for her mother — she’d go off to the state university, join a sorority, begin a love-affair with parties and alcohol –get a teaching job after school — and then riding the crest of heartbreak from a summer love affair born on The Cape — make a stupid decision with a midwestern ski instructor — and end up ‘disgraced’ in a particular way one of her class was disgraced in the mid-sixties — and she’d too would flee to Florida (not knowing, ironically, that she fled to the exact same area where her birth father was living) and it was there she’d meet my father in a bar — and maybe — if she’d married someone from her parent’s club — married some son of a doctor or someone who’d inherit his father’s pharmaceutical company — she’d be drinking too many martinis in some house in Bloomfield Hills…summering where her parents did and … well, I wouldn’t be here, would I?

My mother too is a product of benign neglect — someone who wanted desperately to be seen for herself — desperately to be loved for who she innately was — is.

It’s the world’s most trite saying — but deeply true: there’s a limit to how much you can love when you do not love yourself — the love from a damaged person is a filtered and faltering light fed not from a well deep in the core but from the reflected light of another’s love — and children — their well is deep and they deserve so much more than reflected love…they deserve the deepest and purest of our own wells.

Xoxo.

P.S. I want to write more about the lunch but haven’t unscrambled my thoughts yet….

I wrote this four years ago on my old blog. I know the date because X’s daughter just turned four — and it was the year she gave birth that I had left with a friend to Mexico…I had been trying to conceive for nearly four years at that point (and wouldn’t conceive with IVF for another year–Feb of 09) — at the point of X’s baby’s birth (a girl… which compounded my heartbreak) it had been two years since my first visit to a ‘fertility specialist’ — The year my husband’s ex-wife was pregnant was perhaps the hardest year of my infertility … I wrote this when I returned from Playa del Carmen — and I wrote it for the women I was blogging with then — and I rebroadcast it for anyone who is still in the trenches.

Ixchel still stands on my windowsill looking out into the snow.

***
January 2008

There was a goddess of the water, the moon, of childbirth, of woven things. She fell in love with the Sun, and they say, took him for her lover. Her grandfather, when he found out, sent a blinding flash of lightning arcing through the sky, killing her. For thirteen days the dragonflies grieved for her, hovering above her, singing to her motionless body, and then she awoke, whole and alive, and of course, the nature of love being what it is, followed her lover back to his home. Now the legend doesn’t explain why it is that the Sun grew jealous, or why she fell so deeply for this jealous God that drew her in, and threw her out, and drew her in again — or why it is she kept returning. It only says that one day Ix Chelgrew weary, and left his home and bed to wander the night as she wanted making herself invisibleeverytime he appeared. She spent her time nursing women through pregnancy and birth, especially those who visited her sacred island – an island upon which she bestowed the gift of her favorite bird, the swallow — thus the land came to be known in Mayan AhCuzamil-Peten The Land of the Swallows. Cozumel.

Between 600-1200 A.D. women from all over Mesoamerica came to SanGervasio to honor Ixchel. They came in canoes paddled from the mainland — Cozumel was a land of salt and honey. It’s written thatIxchel is many things – she’s ashapeshifter – a beautiful woman, a bent and wizened crone, a keeper of the cycle of life — from a keeper of the bones and the souls of the dead to the nurturer of life. They would take thistravesias sagradas, this pilgrimage, and walk the sacbe, the sacred road, cobbles now deep in moss and staggered into the jungle.

It is Saturday, our second full day in Mexico. My friend is consumed with her own thoughts.Texting. I recognize that place she is in — when a relationship has suffered a fracture — and the layers of miscommunication are so thick you can’t find your way back to the other person, even if you wanted to — which you aren’t certain you do. She has five children, the youngest two year old twins. She had gastric by-pass surgery before her twins were born and seems surprised with her own body, the kind of solipsism of a fourteen year old girl, posing in front of the mirror, sweetly requesting pictures, wanting to walk in the streets, the resort bar, the avenues where men stand and call out. She wants to be forever visible rather than in her own mind. I want to be invisible and completely in my thoughts. We’ve known one another since we were thirteen and that bond alone keeps our hearts open to one another. I offer the kind of advice I can. Don’t play games. Don’t date other men, or even flirt. Don’t use one person against another. Be vulnerable. Open your heart. Be honest. Be willing to go deep.

It reminds me, as we walk the streets of Playa Del Carmen, the men and women on plastic chairs calling out to braid my hair, of a time in my life when I felt that deep wounded pain and I spend much of my trip feeling so deeply grateful for G. & W., for the kind of deep honor and respect we share, for the similarity of vision. I feel that I have lucked out. Even so, I drink too manypina coladas in the day of full sun that we have and find my pale skin sunburned and rashy. Themojitos from the night before, and the drunken dial to G. while stumbling to dinner makes me groan, my delicate brain chemistry and dipping mood reminding me again why I don’t drink alcohol. “We should take the Ferry to Cozumel” my friend suggests this lightly and the sun is shining, it’s mid-afternoon and we go.

There is a band playing on the ferry’s upper deck in the sun and I enjoy it crossing, my mind thinking of this pilgrimage, of the conversation earlier with G. W’s baby sister had come into the world Friday, ‘a peanut’ G. said fondly on the phone. I’m finding it hard to breathe again, as I did when I found out X. was pregnant, as I did when she was more and more pregnant…and now, of course, it’s here. She. Let’s call her A.

We arrive in Cozumel and find the taxi line to find that SanGervasio, the ruins, closed 15 minutes before. I try to hold back tears as my friend and I walk into town. She’s stayed here before with her husband, the man who plays drums in a local band and who, it seems, can’t decide what life he’s meant to live. We go to their favorite restaurant. Jimmy Buffet’s Margaritaville in Cozumel.

Now.

I wish I could tell you that I enjoyed it, the drunken cruise-ship go-ers in their white paper pirate hats — it was exactly like a dive bar my Uncle frequents on the dying Space-Coast — pelicans and wooden piers, drunken sun-burned people calling for another round. This is where the years that intervene between 13 and 35 are important — I like small, boutique hotels and local handicrafts, and prefer to pay in pesos and try to speak what little language I know, I’d make G. rent a car and we’d travel into tucked away little places.I was a little sad, and disappointed. I was supposed to be in a Mayan jungle. ‘brrrrng’ text. “Well” “A pilgrimage isn’t supposed to be easy,” my friend said to me. We ferried back, in the dark, to the mainland, and took a taxi to our hotel. I called G and W answered — full of information about A. — how tiny she is, how her hand only reaches around two of his fingers.

“You,” I say, making my voice as light and full of excitement as I can “are going to be the best big brother ever. A. is so, so lucky to have you sweetheart.”

Goals and ice-skating and all of it seems so distant and my heart aches.

We wake up Sunday to rain. Light rain. Heavy rain. Light rain and gray skies. We decide to try again, after all my friend says — “It’s your pilgrimage after all.” I call G. to check in and he tells me that somehow when he dropped W off at the hospital he missed X’s husband and so had to bring W up to the room and he met A.

I hold my breath.

His voice is soft and fond talking about her, small “a peanut” he says and his voice is far away and I can’t seem to muster a response. He tells me how much he loves me. He asks, almost plaintively, if I am having a good time. He so wants that for me, and I can hear in his voice that he’s worried.

Now don’t ask me why I didn’t think about weather and the ferry. The ferry ride is half and hour long and the boat holds 400 people. It is painted a bright cheery yellow and is bobbing so at the dock that the plank drags along the concrete as people board. The only seat is below, on the left side near the front. A large man sits next to me, my friend with eyes closed on the other side of me. The boat rocks as we leave land. Then the horizon disappears. The window are nothing but water. The boat holds steady at the crest of a wave, and slides down its length.

At first, I laugh. The entire ship gasps and laughs nervously — Mexicans and tourists alike. Suddenly it’s not funny anymore. My friend texts G. “Rough Seas”

I start to cry. The man next to me is named Alejandro — “respirado..” he mock inhales and exhales” “is better.” “this is a bad bad day to be on this ferry. This is bad for Cozumel.” He gets up to get me a napkin. I apologize profusely for my crying. The horizon disappears, the boat seems destined to flip right over. A handful of people stream to the back. “Those people” Alexjandrosays “those people are going back to..” and he puts his hand in front of his mouth. He gets up and looks out as if he can read the waves. “Not much more time, say twenty minutes.” He tells me about his restaurant. We talk about G. and Lake Superior and when G texts back about humming GordonLightfoot’s ”The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” I can’t really translate other than the fact that my husband has made a joke not really understanding how bad this ferry ride is. Then I get up to go to the bathroom because I can’t imagine being in front of people anymore.

Getting up is worse than sitting. The women behind the refreshment stand look at me sympathetically, and one hands me a wet napkin and when i put it to my mouth the other says ‘no no’ and places it on the back of my neck. I walk to the back door, and someone manages to pry open the lock only to find the roiling open sea behind me and a man, deeply tanned, sixties, a Cousteau sort, hunched over miserably into the gunwales. I stand in the bathroom and then walk back to my seat. Alexandro reassures me. The crowd squeals again in the long slide down a swell. He gets me a small plastic purple bag and yes folks, yes. I vomit in public.

The next text: “Vomit in public. Possibly stranded. Pammy sad.”

G. texts back that he loves me and that given my nature I’m probably sure this means somehow that the pilgrimage is doomed — and that she should give me a big kiss and tell me it will be fine. I still feel overwhelming sick at thezocolo in San Miguel — my friend insists I call G. I protest knowing that if I hear his voice I will lose it, and I do — his voice somehow making me cry harder, like a little girl.

“Oh sweetheart, that sucks. This is supposed to be fun.”

We find a taxi that takes us to San Gervasio through the narrow streets of San Miguel, the election posters and the peeling painted sides of buildings, the rusted awnings, the twisted skeletal limbs of jungle trees left by Hurricane Wilma. Families with small children speed past on mopeds. The taxi turns off a paved road onto a narrow unpaved one — the jungle closer in, walls of stone set in circles dot the road.

At the end we pull up to a large gate and dirt lot, we pay a fee and walk through the few shops and beverage stand into the site itself.

It’s a gray day and the ruins spread before us.

It’s a strange feeling to recapture — at first there was a structure — something that was a private home and altar — with the ochre staining of small hands still there. It stunned me. I thought of this place when the Mayan women would come. The commerce and the bustle. The sacrifices and the prayers.

Small white flowers had opened in the undergrowth. We walked one of the sacred roads, and came to an arch.

As I stand there I read that the through the arch the temple toIxchel would be visible — and I feel myself stirring. Walking from one small ruin to another in my head I pray: Ixchel, I come not only for myself but for Kristin and Amy and Beth, Deanna, and Lori, for Nancy and Sunny,for Oroand Dianne, and Jodi, for Shannon, and Farah, and Von, for Courtney — and my mind goes to all of the blogs I read — women all over the country, from every profession, every political stripe — every experience — women (and men) who fill my heart
A Woman My Age
Baby Steps to Baby Shoes
Cheese and Whine
Dead Baby Jokes
Flutter of Hope
Infertility Irony
Into the Rabbit Hole
Maybe Baby
Mission: Impossible, or adventures in infertility
My Journey Towards my Little Miracle
Stirrup Queens and Sperm Palace Jesters
The Girl and the Olive
The New Life of Nancy – Infertile and Sarcastic
The Open Door
The Stirrup Queen’s Completely Anal List of Blogs That Proves That She Really Missed Her Calling as a Personal Organizer
Tobacco Brunette
Trying to Say So What to Life’s Lemons

Pregnancy Blogs
Baby Moxie
Fertilize Me
Flotsam
Murphy is a Bastard
That was The Plan
The Adventures of (In)Fertile Frank
The Liminal Universe
The Sticky Bean Preconception Journal
Thwarted Repeatedly

I think of those women I haven’t met yet and those above, and I think of the specific prayers I brought from emails, I unfold them and I read them aloud, my eyes filling with tears. I think of all of this, and myself and G. and I pray Ixchel, please fill these lives with the fertile joy of new life, please bring them the baby they so want in their hearts, please watch over their pregnancies and their births, please keep them and their babies safe — please honor my pilgrimage as theirs, know that in me that they have honored you, pleaseIxchel know that I honor you, know I come with an open heart. Amen.

My friend takes a photo and out of the corner of my eye I see a flash of color. A small yellow butterfly. My friend tells me this is a sign.

Before we leave I duck my head into one of the tiny shops at the entrance. I ask the woman“Ixchel?” and she points out statue, 13 inches high — terracotta almost. A hunched back, broad shouldered figure with a yellow snake emerging from its forehead, banded with black and red, green ceremonial plates covering her ears, a yellow breastplate, perhaps a bird, fierce features, and yet breasts, and clasped between its hands a skull like vessel — this is the vessel that hold life — and this is Ixchel – weary of he jealous lover, freeing herself to wander the skies, watching over the cycle of life.

I didn’t get sick on the ferry on the way back. Nauseous, yes. And frankly — very much so. My friend began to joke that perhaps I was pregnant — violently sick at every opportunity. (I’m not..so there’s no suspense) So sick that for that night and the next day I just wanted to lie on the cold Mexican tile and the only thing I wanted to do was be home. The next day when I did emerge from the room I looked up to the sky, looking for some kind of sign — parrots, some small Mexican version of a crow — I thought ofIxchel’s sparrows, and I thought of my prayers. I prayed that my friend whose husband was not unlike the jealous sun, would find her way again.

I thought of home and my love, of W and X and now A. I looked up again and above the thatched roof the unmistakable dip and swoop of a swallow.

When G. picked me up with his sweet smile, and gifts (crackers, 7-up, bucket — haagen daz ice cream and a spoon, big heads of sun-flowers in a vase on the counter at home) we drove home through the stark, blue-lit snow under a full moon.

(I got a well deserved F. Goes to show you it’s never too late to start.)