I check her face daily for any sign of gloom, but as she has gotten older, Claire has become quite adept at presenting a happy facade to the world; one she believes the world wants to see, and one I desperately wanted to believe was her true self.
But I guess men would feel undermined in the role of muses, don’t you think? Well, you’re right, not all men. All men who keep saying not all men, though; those are precisely the men I’m talking about.
Still, I decide this, as her mother and current counsel: it is wiser to face truth and stand beside it. It is better to keep the door open to possibility.
I kept saying “yes” to men (not many, but who counts in matters of pretend love?), in hopes that when I exposed my terrified, longing-filled heart, my partner would respond in kind. It wasn’t about love leading to sex, but sex leading to love.
And really, I repeatedly told myself, my mother was useless, helpless, a victim and a fool. She’d married my father and even after she knew his true nature, she never left. By staying, she allowed herself to be abused and she watched him abuse her children.
I wonder if I even know how to have fun anymore. I work each day at a job that I do not enjoy. Each evening I go home and battle with my children, making them do things they don’t want to do—eat dinner, do homework, go to bed—and start all over the next morning. Even my hobbies are nerdy pursuits most people would not consider fun—writing, knitting, bird-watching.
I figured Dad’s leaving had something to do with all those times Mom locked herself in the bathroom. Once inside, she would blow like a firecracker, and I would get the spins, the whole house twirling off into darkness.
Our culture has a difficult time with awkward silence because our culture has a difficult time with uncertainty. Perhaps this is why we fear awkward silences – they expose uncertainty about where we stand in relation to one another.
And being a daddy’s girl, I absorbed the judgment that folks with tattoos were somehow weak or flawed.
I was almost fifty when we interviewed the woman who as secretary would become the lynch pin of our school office. I was first impressed by her buoyant smile and effervescent personality. But a close second point of interest was the bit of tattoo peeking out from the neck of her shirt on her left breast. I thought it might be an animal head but wasn’t sure.
I’ve been riding a knife edge for too long. I have always worried, mostly about nothing, death, being alone when I’m old, some odd pain that could be a blood clot. Or not.
