Even with my most focused recollection all I can see is a pink wrinkly smiling boy staring up at me with clear deep blue eyes. The pain of delivery has all been erased.
I remember extra-large fuzzy blankets just out of an electric warmer. The midwives wrapping me over and over in their warmth as I screamed, while simotaniously cursing and ignoring my my deeply rooted agnosticism by invoking jesus's name in deep large gasps. I remember the warm wet tub of water that enveloped my bulging belly as I pushed for hours to no avail. The sweet hands of my mother and my partner. I remember mouthing the words to norah jones and the dixie chicks silently grabbing at something to transport my mind out of my body. I remember these things as if they were small gifts of comfort. The backdrop of pain exists only in theory now. Time has washed it all clean.
My marriage, now only wreckage on a distant beach is the same. I remember the happy memories, like vacation photos uploaded on Facebook. Smiling happy people. No photos of arguments or skinned knees. All the morning coffee, the long trips, all the excitement of new ideas boiled and concocted together. The daily sweetness he gave willingly without anything demanded in return.
I need to force myself to feel the other bits so that I feel no regret for my choices. I need to burn the dark portraits of forgotten moments back into my memory so the truth can let me find peace and seek out happiness in every crack and crevice while sorting through this messy rubble of life.
I need to remember the fat dreary man who sat mostly on the couch for years inhaling dry desert weed out of a long glass tube, or in the later years possibly drunk on hidden vodka kept anonymously in his bag.
I need to remember what I said to the lovely tan blonde danish girl while we stood knee deep in ocean water on the most perfect of white sand beaches off the coast of Thailand. Her complementing me on my beautiful family, "I never really fell in love with him." I said "He wasn't the one I should have stayed with." I said it as if I was confessing this secret to a priest in a confessional. I confessed it to her as a stranger who would take this sad fact with her as she left the beach and store it in her cold northern homeland for no one else to see. Remove this truth from my otherwise perfect tropical sun drenched nomadic life. This fantasy life I alone created, dragging him along nearly unwillingly, a mere passenger on my ship. Wilted soggy lettuce left on the sandwich of our life, going thru the motions of our day without the vision to appreciate what we had. Me writing research papers for money while sipping cappuccino on exotic beaches while my son frolicked in the sea. Him with time to do whatever he pleased. He chose nothing as his clear best option.
I should remember that I whispered this same dark truth over the years to anyone who would listen. Even the year we started dating I felt this. I said this to my best friend. "He is not Indiana jones." I said. "I want Indiana jones." Wet lettuce was not enough for me, but I accepted it as all that was possible while saving my imagination for the rest of my life. I was afraid to be alone, left to wait. Stoned wet lettuce that was sweet to me beyond words was a fair replacement for loneliness. But just as time is generous, we grew together and he grew to be all of my life and love.
Let me remind myself of this past, let me forgive myself for smashing it all. For letting a strong Russian man befriend me, flirt with me relentlessly without even a kiss as condolence for need. Let me forgive myself for sneaking out at night and letting him buy me cake without asking, for liking it. For spending that long night over wine with the power out and candles blazing. Each of us pretending to care about our conversation as we danced with thick desire. Each daring the other to leave the restaurant and find a bed, until closing time arrived and it was clear that neither of us had the courage to betray our family or my best friend, his wife. Rinse and repeat for months, years even. Over and over again until this mad torture made me plunge wildly off a cliff and demand the man who fathered my child to leave our house. Little did I know our marriages were both already long expired, like milk that had soured and was only left in the refrigerator waiting for someone to throw out. Let me forgive myself for wanting that male strength, for wanting that unordered cake. Let me forgive myself for smashing my family and leaving myself alone.
But let me also use this bitter memory to remind myself of what can happen when loneliness is left to comfort itself with what is near.
Last night I left my son with my parents who had just arrived from Bangkok exhausted from having spent the previous night in the airport. I left all the best people who unconditionally care about me the most so that I could steal small bits of time with a man who sees me daily and lets me share his bed but won't admit publicly that we are anything more than good "mates".
I arrived at his house for dinner and a movie not to find the man who occasionally shows up to meet my imagination but his polar opposite. He was not the dashing freelance journalist who looks like Lenny Kravitz if he cared more about academics. He was not the witty and sweet and easy to talk to Australian. He was instead clear as day, the recovering alcoholic, who was drinking coke having just smoked a cigarette. In his funnier moments flashing his newly found fat belly and in his darker moments finding things to poke at me about like he was using a sharp hot stick. I could search out no witty retort. I sat across from him receiving no pretense of affection and wondering why my loneliness was trying to convince me he was something I needed. As I walked away with a hug that I alone gave, I pondered why I continued to torture myself in this way. What was I getting but the promise that he would have a good night and want me and hold me. I walked away from his company on stolen time even lonelier than before. I had smashed vast quantities of love given freely and this is what I stumbled into after years of wanting something more. I stay in constant anticipation that he might once reach out his hand to me. As I left he apologized for his mood. I forgave him, I wait with baited breath for the next moment that fills me up. I need this like I need water after a long dry night. I am thirsty. Why can't he give it to me?
Tomorrow is another day, but let me remember that this is real and true, don't let the rose colored glasses of time wipe this away. Birth is painful, my marriage was not all joy, this man with his curly hair and warmth has more to him that is dark than I want to admit. This is true, remember it. Don't keep walking forward blindly. Find light, seek it out, you just have to look for it. Remember the pain as it was. Real.
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