Barely aware of naked branches bent beneath an inch of snow just outside the office window, I was a weeping stone before the lighted altar of images of what I believed to be my geographical savior. I called up the site of Taos NM online newspaper for breakfast, lunch, and dinner, making magical mental plans of how our family could make it there (again). I was the repentant child begging for one more chance. We had no savings, our income was inadequate for even daily life expenses, and for now, we called home for our family of three a small spare bedroom at my husband’s brother’s house in small town Illinois.
Aching for the magic bullet of my dearly longed-for mountainous desert consumed my emotional life. I was a miserable mate to the man who promised to be my life partner, not to mention an ungrateful border, and poor housekeeper (as we were keeping too much in our small borrowed space). Looking back I see we should have kept more in our RV, the behemoth that swallowed my in-law’s driveway, blocking a fair amount of sun from reaching their back yard.
Poverty breaks many a spell, quenches determination and reason in some and feeds the fire of “I will not give up” in others. Thank God I married a fighter. He carried me emotionally until he started a new career – that promised to pull us out of a very deep financial hole – as an over-the-road truck driver, leaving me to be the nearly 24 hour care giver of our son, as well as the new seed of life growing within my tired frame.
This second miracle of life was unexpected. Though plans for truck driving school and hisnew job were set before we learned of this growing being in my womb, I tried to demand that my husband could not follow through. I needed him. He calmly but firmly informed me that having another mouth to feed convinced him further of the rightness of our decision for him to make a career of hauling freight around the continental forty eight.
I was now speeding down the road to maturity or insanity.
An eternity of weeks after my husband left for driving school, I sat on the kitchen floor a few feet from my two year old son who kicked his feet beneath his lunch in a highchair. Longing rushed through me like a freight train in that quiet house. For the first time in my life, I was so lonely I though I would die.
“I want to eat hot dogs and watermelon at the beach with a whole bunch of friends. I want sunshine. I want to hear people laughing.”
My son, in all his beautiful innocence suggested we get on with it. “Call people now!” he offered. “Let’s go get some watermelon!” His smile broke my heart. Immediately I wished I’d kept my mouth shut, but who can stop a moving locomotive. How could I tell my dear, who was surely lonely too, so new was this isolation we were experiencing, that there would be no picnic since there was no money, mom had no energy, and just then, she was convinced that no friend wanted to deal with her.
Pathetic, yes, but also terrifyingly real. I had no way of quickly adjusting from having been in Taos NM in real life only a couple months before to my life at that deafeningly sad moment. Yes, it was my anxiety and whining, my desperate tears, and pitiful pleas of, “I can’t take it!” that brought us home from a dream I naively thought would be easy: living in an RV, writing near the home of my mentor in northern NM, breathing sky every day. So much space for clarity brought a painful childhood to the front. I had not supressed painful memories, but the sadness of that little girl I was. All the sadness I was not allowed to feel back then washed over me when I heard gravel crackle beneath my shoes every time I walked to the campgrounds shower room, drove the barren five miles into town, or remembered I was surrounded by strangers (a concept I didn’t even know I believed in – foreignness, but here I was, the outsider).
Yes, it was my shame that glared back at me in a parking lot in Amarillo at 1am on our drive back to familiar, family, the Midwest, and away from the possibility of living my dream. “You were up to the challenge but you threw a veritable tantrum and got your way. You were going to be fine. It was hard, but you could have made it through,” I had whispered through tears. Yes, it was my prayer immediately following this stunningly awful realization that begged God to help me always remember this sinking devastation, that I may never, ever, pull the pity card again to avoid acutely painful emotions.
Now six months later, here I was, mired in seemingly insurmountable challenges, living the answer. I suffered no illusions as to what was going on and why.
It takes a year to adjust to being not quite a single mom, just mostly. One weekend in four with husband/father is not enough, but it had to be.
That summer, my boy and I spent most afternoons curled up on our twin mattress in an apartment we were barely able to afford now that dad was making at least a little more money, reading from a stack of colorfully decorated books. One line from a book of poems for children broke and mended my heart over and over between bare walls, “Can I, can I catch the wind, in my two hands, catch the wind?” Happiness was that elusive, my dreams were that invisible, evidence of my hopes living only in a small leather bound jpournal where I wrote line after line of detailed visions of what I hoped our life could be in ten years: more beautiful than the sunrise.
In August, we packed up again, and drove southwest, this time without the assuring presence of my husband. He would come home when a load permitted, but he could do that anywhere I chose to settle. I couldn’t stay in a nest of corn fields and die a little more each day. Seven and a half months pregnant, with a doula and a birth center awaiting us in Taos, we drove through hot, slept on a small couch in the back of grocery store parking lots, and prayed our 32 foot home would make the trip without incident. Six days later, we pulled into a beautiful campgrounds five miles up a winding mountain road.
To be continued.
Today is my one year anniversary on Open Salon. Before beginning this tale, I had no idea what to say. So I came to the page empty. I sat down, prayed for guidance, and my heart bled. I have barely been able to mention the beginning of my relationship to loneliness and the bottom that finally woke me up enough to decide to grow up. Maybe, just maybe, this is the frame for the opening of “the book” I’m writing. You know the one, the story of a woman’s soul bared that perchance, even one life can be spared the same anguish. In maddening fashion, I expect to go back and forth in time, hoping the reader can follow.
If this is truly the beginning of that book, how fitting, as this year, I have grown as a writer in ways I would have thought impossible, largely due to the challenges posed by brilliant writers on OS as well as their incredible talent, and a rushing river of encouragement from so many.
