My sister wrote a blog post... It's beautiful... it made me cry... I seem to have a habit of buying presents that I won't be able to give... I bought an owl onesie for Rhonda's baby... Rhonda's angel baby, Corban. And I bought Nathan a scarf for his birthday...I know that's kinda a lame birthday gift, I was going to get him more, but never got the chance... Maybe I already told you this story? I'm not sure... but I don't want to go back and look, so I suppose I will tell it again. We went scarf shopping a few weeks before he went back to the hospital and he really liked this grey plaid scarf... but it didn't match what he would wear it with, so I told him he should buy the all black one... and he did... so I went back a few days later and got him the one he really liked... and I snuck it in the house and hid it from him... and I wish I hadn't, cause he never knew. I wish I'd just brought it in and given it to him right then. Such a small sadness, in the midst of everything else... but... He would have gotten so exctied about that silly scarf. He would always get so excited about the small things that just showed that you were paying attention to him... He didn't really care about gifts that much, but knowing that people loved him... he cared about that, a lot.
I want him back.
Weak and strong, weak and strong... I just bounce back and forth like one of those rubber balls you get from the quarter machine when you are little... Nathan loved those, too (the super balls, not the toy machines)... so much of him was still 5 years old... I loved that about him... How he couldn't wait to get home to play a new video game (and you'd best believe that was what was going to be happening as soon as we walked into the door.) I loved how he grinned at every opportunity and told me I was beautiful every single day. I loved how often he said he loved me... I loved so much about him... and I miss him so much. I went to Sam's club... It's a little strange but it was rather hard... Nothing makes a gal feel more alone than bulk food I guess... Especially when most of the bulk food she bought was for her husband who liked to get on food kicks...
I don't know how to grocery shop... everything seems to go bad before I can eat it all... this is why I have a refrigerator full of drinks but not very much food... Drinks mainly stay good... except for milk which I trade out every once in a while...same thing with cooking... I don't know how to cook for one person... I don't really know how to do very much alone... I don't know that I'm very good with alone at all... I don't know that I have much of a choice in the matter, though. I hate being alone. I hate that everyone has to leave... but if people stay over I start to feel trapped and I freak out, too... I'm pretty well a nutcase. Mainly cause I want one person to stay over... you know the one who "stayed over" for the last 3.5 years.
It's funny and so typically me that when I see people in the Sam's looking at me I want to say, "This isn't me... I'm not some single girl. I was married at 23! I was snatched up, cause I'm awesome! It's just that... my husband died. But I'm a secure, confident, married gal, on the inside!" Only I think I'm trying to convince myself more than I'm trying to convince anyone else-- Cause those people aren't really wondering about me and who I am and my relationship status... They probably don't even see me... unless it's as a mirror for their own insecurity, you know, like me.
I used to do that when I was a little kid... If I would be somewhere with one parent I would talk loudly around strangers about the other parent... you know, just so the strangers would know that I had two parents... Oh yes, it's a life long psychosis.
Being married was good for me... It was good for my self-confidence, it was good for my patience, and it was good to have someone to take care of... sometimes I wish we had had children... even though I know that would be so hard right now... and I'm not sure how we would have managed over the 16 months of treatment... but then I'd have a link... and something to throw myself into... and someone to take care of... and something to hide behind.
Beautifully written, Renee.
ReplyDeleteI like my alone time, but not too much, and in public it always wears on my nerves. MFK Fischer (one of my favorite writers, not least because she almost always wrote about one of my favorite things, food) wrote an essay about dining alone. Ooh, and a little googlebird just whispered in my ear that the whole things is published in Gourmet, here: http://www.gourmet.com/magazine/1940s/1948/12/mfkfisheranalphabetforgourmets
But I liked how she described the difficulty of dining alone in public as a woman... and being well-behaved. And ordering what you want, and not being afraid to tell the waiter or the butcher or the bartender or the grocery bagger exactly how you want things done. As in:
"I resolved to establish myself as a well-behaved female at one or two good restaurants where I could dine alone at a pleasant table with adequate attentions rather than be pushed into a corner and given a raw or over-weary waiter simply because I might become a nuisance.... without turning into a potentially maudlin pickup for The Gentleman at the Bar."