Chapter Twelve: Breathing Room

A SHORT LIST OF REASONS I DON’T WRITE MORE OFTEN

I’d write all the time

--and we know that I would—

But things don’t just happen that way.

The bills are still due

On the first of the month

And so far my writing doesn’t pay.

If I wrote in the morning

While the sun is on the rise

I could get a few pages done.

But sooner or later

They’d disturb my peace

My husband, my daughter, my son.

I could write in the day

(while they’re all away)

On, the words would be wrought!

But the sixth grade students

Who clutter my room

Have come to expect they’ll be taught.

If I wrote in the evening

I am ever so sure

A novel would easily be writ.

But the people at my house

Need to be fed

And the cook has just up and quit.

There’s homework to do

And papers to grade

And the kitchen’s in need of a scrub

I could be Will Shakespeare

If I just had the time

But, ah! There’s the rub!

Did people expect Papa Hemingway

To don an apron and cook?

Did Emily Bronte scrub pots and pans

While crafting the pages of books?

The time I do find

To scribble my lines

Is stolen in snatches and snips.

Somehow the writing

All intertwines

With my life as I’m living it.

The truth is if I

Were to hermit away

And shut out these things in my life

My pages would be

All pristine and blank

For I’d have absolutely nothing to say.

CHAPTER TWELVE.

JULY 21, 2000. 12 PM.

            God is trying to pull my fingers away. Since Ron’s accident, my fists have been tightly balled. Probably I clenched them tightly before that, when bi-polar disorder became the ruler of our lives. The children—especially Allen!—were so young! Like any mother tiger, I wanted to protect my offspring and spare them heartache and harm. There was so much to be lost. I stood as the shield between my three babies and the rest of the evil world.

            After the accident, my grasp became even tighter. The rules I was familiar with and had carefully followed no longer applied. I used to tell my children that if you followed the rules and played on the side of right, you wouldn’t get hurt. When the truck ran the red light and crashed into Ron, the rules changed. In fact, there were no longer any rules. Suddenly, every evil lurked outside my door, eager to grab my darlings. Dennis—smart one!—had already escaped to the city, proclaiming his independence quite vocally when he was nineteen. He gave me no recourse but to let him go.

            Bonnie and Allen were not so lucky. I wonder now that they did not choke and suffocate but—bless them!—they seemed to understand my need to reassure myself several times a day that they were still safe. Bonnie expected me to call Genuardi’s if she was half an hour late coming home from work. She carried her cell phone with nary an “Ah, Mom!” and didn’t make faces when I reminded her—again—to keep her car doors locked. I know I rained on a parade or two when she’d made plans with friends and I nixed them, pulling the “you live in my house” routine. She never complained. She told me she understood.

            Allen learned early that it was easier to leave me notes and messages then have me stomp around the neighborhood looking for him, conjuring up kidnapping plots in my mind. He never failed to tack a note onto the front door if he went out before I came home. If he was cruising the neighborhood on his bike and alighted at a friend’s house, he’d call. “Mom, I’m at Greg’s. Just wanted you to know.”

            I have been trying hard these last few weeks, with Ron’s return to the work force and the world of driving, to relax a little. I no longer cringe when my family is out of my sight and I hear the sound of an ambulance. I still like to know their whereabouts and estimated time of arrival—I’m cooking dinner here, you know—but I have begun to trust them and their good judgment.

            “Oh, my God, I trust in thee,” says Psalm 25:2. How can I say this if I do not trust God with my children?

JULY 24, 2000. 3PM.

            Ron is planning a garden for next spring. While he is not necessarily gifted with a green thumb, he’s decided that the front hill should bloom with bright colors next year to elicit feelings of warmth in passers-by. It may be just a ploy to get out of cutting the grass on the front slope, but the garden Ron is planning will require much more care and concern than a simple swipe of the mower blades. A new garden, with its tender shoots and fragile buds, needs watering and nurturing, snipping and weeding. It is a large investment of time and energy, not to mention trips to the Home Depot, that may not pay off if there is a late frost or a mid-summer drought. It is a risk. But, if all the elements come together in the proper measurements, what a wonder it can be! I can close my eyes and see it now, the way Ron envisions it, a profusion of anemones and petunias, marigolds to keep the rabbits at bay, nasturtiums and blue irises, a rainbow of hues and colors lining our hill.

            I am not much of a gardener myself. In fact, I had to open up the “F” volume of my encyclopedia to come up with that many flower names. The fault lies not in my soul—which craves both beauty and poetry—but in my hay-fever and severe reactions at the mere mention of poison ivy. I grow things in pots that do not have to be weeded. I have not been above using silk flowers in an outdoor planter. (In fact, my friend Ginny has a wishing well in her front yard with a gorgeous array of artificial blooms. The little girl next door waters them every day.) Any gardening done around here will be done by Ron.

            I realize that a lot of people begin planning their garden at this time of year, sending for seed catalogs and samples from Burpees. It’s not something that can be left until the last minute. There is soil to be turned and layouts to plan. That’s the whole point: Ron is planning a garden. Ron doesn’t—or at least, hasn’t for the last eight years—plan anything. It has been enough of a burden for him to get through each day. He has lived by the words of Matthew 6:24, “Sufficient unto the day is the evil therof.” But he has missed the hope of verse 35, which says,” Seek ye first the Kingdom of God.” Many were the days he wearily arrived home from work and went to bed, too overwhelmed with shadows to be a part of our family. Or the alternative, even worse: complaining all evening, at every turn of the conversation, about his miserable life. The kids and I became adept at ignoring him, choosing instead to remember the “pre-depression era” Ron. This was hard for Allen to do, since his memories of Ron have been built more recently. He depended upon his older siblings to fill in moments that went with the family photographs.

            But now Ron is planning a garden and the key word is “planning.” Webster’s defines “planning” as “deciding upon a future action.” In envisioning next year’s garden growing on our hill, Ron relies upon a future. For him. For us. For our family. For those carefully chosen, carefully tended flowers he hopes to grow. It is risky business, given not only the vagaries of nature but of life. It may not turn out as he had planned. He is willing to take the risk.

            So am I. For eight years, I have waited and prayed that the demons which poked and prodded him would one day be vanquished. Sometimes it seems as if the darkness would never end.

            There may still be a promise of spring.

AUGUST 18, 2000. 11AM.

            I DID IT! With two weeks left to spare before I face the world of blackboards again, I have conquered all ninety levels of Sokoban this summer! The mad Japanese transport game came on my laptop and I staunchly ignored it for a year, too busy learning the programs I actually needed for teaching at Westtown to involve myself in anything quite so frivolous. But this summer, I became entranced by the little breathing Sokoban ball that so intently pushed locked boxes through the mazes, lining them up in perfect order. To my disappointment, there was no fanfare when I completed level 90, but it only momentarily depleted from my sense of fulfillment. Along with working on my novel and getting a second hole in my ears, beating this game has been right up there with my summer goals.

            I haven’t finished my novel yet and I’m still sorting out all of my journals from the accident. The material for my new kitchen curtains is lying on my sewing machine. The basement is only half-cleaned out. But I have had victory over that controlling, heavily breathing blue Sokoban creature and its locked boxes! My daughter watched me complete the last two levels with something akin to amusement. Mom? Computer games? She commented that I had developed “fast fingers” and ran through each course much more quickly than I had in June. I’ve made fewer mistakes in the last twenty levels. In fact, not to brag, I completed levels 88 and 89 on only one try.

            “Must be getting easier,” I told Bonnie.

            “No,” she replied. “You’re getting better.”

            Getting better. Ear piercings aside, it was what we all needed and wanted this summer. There was an ad a few years back—I forget for what—that decried, “You’re not getting older, you’re getting better!” It has become my battle cry this summer as we all drifted away from the hospital zone and learned to treat Ron as a “normal” person again. I say it with fervor. We are all getting better. Ron’s gentle rise from the gripes of bipolar depression has raised our own spirits. The last eight years have been shrouded in gray clouds. The sky seems a bit clearer.

            I wonder sometimes at the stress I was able to bear and still keep on going, mostly smiling. The “better” me marvels at the woman who held it all together.

            True, I still bear a lot of responsibilities. While improving, Ron needs a lot of encouragement and help. Slowly, I am trying to transfer back to him some of the responsibilities given over to me. He is now handling his own credit card bill. I needed to walk him through the process, step by step, just as I did the older children when they began to handle their own finances. Ron is once again responsible for car maintenance and repairs. The bulk of our home-life and finances is still mine, but I have a little breathing room.

            I am getting better. In those final levels of Sokoban, I realized I was carefully scrutinizing the board for possible problems before I began to move. Most of the time, it enabled me to avoid the pitfalls altogether. I sailed through the final stages, planning each step beforehand. It is just one more lesson learned from the Japanese game: look for the potential problems and avoid them before they occur.

            I return to the real world in just ten days. There is a classroom to be readied, lesson plans to finish, new students to meet. But I will return better than I left, renewed, refreshed, and rested. Ready. The respite of the summer and the lessons learned from a computer game will carry me across the long stretch of blackboard jungle.

            I’m getting better. As a woman, as a wife, as a writer, as a teacher. Better because—for the first time in a long time—I gave myself a break and spent some time doing something that wasn’t going to make a hill of beans difference to the world. And as I moved my little Sokoban creature, huffing and puffing its way around the board, the world went on without me.

            It’s probably better for that, too.

AUGUST 20, 2000. 8PM.

            Our twenty-fifth wedding anniversary looms ahead. The kids like to look at our wedding album and point out how young their dad and I were. They laugh at the powder blue tuxedos—it was the seventies, after all—and Uncle Tom with an Afro. And they are planning an anniversary service for us, complete with music and ushers and a reception and a chance to renew our vows. Invitations have gone out to sixty people. Most are coming. Even Pastor Lou, who will be leaving our church for a position in New Jersey next week, is coming back to do our service.

            Ron has already written the words he will recite to me. I heard this from Bonnie, who helped him print them out on the computer. I have thought carefully about what I will say but have not yet put pen to paper. I admit I was a little nervous about asking Ron to write his own. He’s not what you call a poetic soul, particularly since the clouds of depression have obscured much of what is good in his life. When we talked to Pastor Lou about our plans, he gave some pointers to Ron to help him: look through some books and ask for suggestions from friends. The most important thing will be, Lou pointed out, that Ron speak from the heart.

            Ron wrote them without help. Yesterday afternoon when the house was deserted of all life except one cat, Ron composed them on a piece of lined paper that is now printed out and folded into his wallet. He reviewed them again and again, making the words familiar to his mind. Since the accident, we have found that things sometimes slip through the cracks of his brain. Language that was once familiar to him looks foreign. He is determined that the words he speaks on October 7 be familiar and said without hesitation.

            It doesn’t matter what he has written. The simple—difficult for him—act of writing them, of looking at them several times a day and practicing the words until they can roll off his tongue, are my true gift. It is another indication that Ron is healing. I cannot imagine the pre-accident Ron, who lived in a world composed of dark thoughts, committing himself to such a loving task.

            But the words are there, on that piece of folded paper, tucked into his wallet along with the list of names we planned on giving our children the night we got engaged. There have been more than twenty-five years between those two slips of paper. They are both tangible reminders not only of our love and commitment to each other, but of God’s love for us.

            Promises made. Promises kept.