It was cancer.

I didn’t know that it was cancer until I woke up after surgery. We’d agreed, the oncologist and I, that if it was cancer, he’d take everything out. If it was benign, I’d just lose my ovaries. When I woke up, I asked the nurse if I still had a uterus. He said no. And then the ground opened up underneath me and I lost track of myself.

At first, the oncologist said that it did not look good. There were no ovaries left in the tumors that had consumed them. It looked like stage 3 HGSC. You should not look up the survival rates, they told me, which I then immediately did and then thought about survivor benefits for my daughter vs. medical debt for rolling the dice on treatments to try to stay alive.

What most people say is that ovarian cancer is a cancer you manage. It’s never really gone. It just grows and spreads sometimes and sometimes does not. And also, once you have cancer, you are Forever With Cancer. If you’re past the point of treatment, and you’re looking like you’re in the clear, you have visits with oncologists every 3 months to see if you’re living or dying. Then six months. Then annually, then every three years or every year until you die, either of cancer or of something else. Most cancer treatments have side effects that take people out.

I joined a support group for people with ovarian cancer. And it’s taught me to see the pattern in how people seem to go. Bowel obstructions are killing most of the people in the group who are dying. They post on the group page to ask about effective ways to move one’s bowels. They get advice. They are admitted to a hospital. Then hospice, and then a spouse or sometimes a sister will post about losing that person and how good it was that the group was there to help support them. People talk about the importance of second opinions. Some people post about how they’re still here, years later, not dying of cancer.

For about ten days after surgery, the time slipped back and forth, and I don’t remember much. My sister in law came over with groceries and told me again and again how well I was doing, how good it was to see me be up and around because when she had a hysterectomy, she was in bed for far longer. I may have said out loud that if I was going to die, I did not want to rest. But I didn’t want to not rest either. I was on a lot of drugs, and the drugs made time move differently, and it did not feel like a blessing to be blissfully stoned. It felt like robbery.

A best friend came to help with all of the things that I usually do. She dropped my kid off and picked her up from school and took her to gymnastics and did yoga at night and read her stories and tucked her in, and it was a blessing and it also felt like robbery.

Somewhere in there, the oncologist called with an update from pathology. Cancer, but low grade and less deadly. But the five year survival rate is between 70% and 85%. That’s not 100%. I asked the oncologist if he thought this was going to take me out, and he said, “Not necessarily.” Because I could get into a car accident or have a heart attack or be hit by a meteor. The drug I’m taking to keep cancer at bay causes liver failure. So, there’s that as a possibility, too.

It seems like if I follow The Rules, I could maybe get to live. I need to lose body fat. I already have osteopenia from malnutrition from disordered eating in my youth, so now I need to lift weights and strength train. Morning: levothyroxine, celexa (hot flashes and depression), low dose aspirin (inflammation), zyrtec (helps with bone pain), omega 3s, chinese herbal stuff having to do with mushrooms and NK cells and salvia and gingko to try to stave off heart disease and brain fog from suddenly not having access to estrogen. Garlic (anticancer), tart cherry (inflammation and pain), berberine (I don’t remember). Night: Metformin (something about blood sugar and cancer, and PCOS still being A Thing despite not having ovaries), anastrazole (normally for breast cancer, but this time for ovarian cancer), calcium, magnesium, vitamin K, vitamin D, a multi vitamin. And now, sometimes xanax or klonpin if I need to stop panicking about death and the future. Sometimes straight up weed if I want to be in my body and to enjoy the cold sheets against my skin in the middle of a hot flash.

For the first time in her six years of life, my daughter did not have to beg me to sleep with her. I just wanted (still want) to hold on to her as much and as long as I can. I want her to know the fierceness of my love. I don’t want to deliver to her my middle-of-the-night terror of dying and leaving her without a mother before she gets to adulthood, but the thought lives on a carousel in my mind, round and round and up and down and always, always there in the background. And I tell myself that I want to be there if she needs me in the night, when she wakes up uncertain about what’s real. I want her to know that I’m there, that I’m real, that I love her unconditionally every single second, even when it doesn’t seems like it.

I started seeing a therapist. She tells me that I need to learn to love myself just as fiercely, and that’s just not as easy.

What I do to love myself:

Stare at myself in the mirror. Say, “I love you.” Laugh at me. See the bitterness in my eyes toward me. I have always felt this sense of disdain. Try to talk myself out of hating me. I love you when you’re hard. I love you even when you have cancer. I love you even when you forget The Rules.

Dance in the kitchen to shitty 80s metal. It helps. It makes me laugh at me too. And when I feel silly, when I feel myself nurturing the disdain, I dance harder, and more ridiculously.

I drink expensive coffee.

I’m working on it. It’s not enough.

The ultrasound showed interesting masses that are not clearly cancer, nor are they clearly benign. The blood test showed that if it’s cancer, it’s not metastatic, which is good news. The woman who did the second ultrasound was the same woman who did the ultrasound on my daughter the day she was born. The cysts are complex and over 10 cm. Referral to cancer doctor. A man. A triathlete with three children and large biceps.

In the waiting room at the cancer center, I saw a man who, when he’s not battling cancer, teaches across the hall from me. His cancer is very public. He makes youtube videos about having cancer and loving Jesus all at the same time. When he took a long term leave last year while he was losing his hair and his youth, a new teacher in my department made him a quilt. One side has a cross on it. The other side features some get well notes and pictures that kids drew. She added inspirational messages about, like, carpe-ing one’s diem and lemons and lemonade and the making of it– how does one make metaphorical lemonade out of cancer? In the darkest of my thoughts, I consider– as someone who has struggled with suicidal ideation (and who ironically is heading up a suicide prevention effort at work), the only way to look at cancer as a blessing is as a super religious Jesus loving person who just wants to die to go home, or someone who has actively hoped to be crushed by a meteor or struck by lightning or whatever. Maybe you get what you ask for.

I don’t want a fucking quilt.

And look, if I’m honest, my main motivation for being alive is not abandoning my kid before she’s ready to take on the challenges of adulthood by herself. I feel like if I can make it to 80, she’ll be 40, and while 40 is still awfully young, she’ll probably have some kind of steady income by then and my death would mean.. it doesn’t matter. What matters is that I don’t want to die of cancer, and I don’t want to die right now, and the plan to avoid all that is for me to have a hysterectomy on November 9. That’s a little more than one more month of two extra strength acetaminophen and three ibuprofens every six hours on the dot every day until surgery, at which point I will take additional narcotics until I can get around enough to not need anything but artificial hormones until I die when I’m old. Older. Elderly, at least. And if they take it out and it’s cancerous, well then that’s a whole different post.

The last school year was a difficult one, but a joyful one, too. Busy beyond all measure. Over in a blink. But in the blink, something happened to my body that I ignored in the busyness, and now that I am free of the grind, I have to face it. In the last three months, I’ve had periods of unbearable pain. I think it’s my reproductive organs, and I’ll know by the end of the month. My blood pressure has been immoveable, not yet dipping below 150/95 with doubled medication. Every six hours when the ibuprofen and tylenol wear off, I feel like my uterus is trying to claw its way out of my body. I’m bleeding, always. These symptoms are google-able, and when I google them and find a word like “fibroid” and “cyst” I am comforted by the banal nature of the word. How many times have women in my life mentioned fibroids and cysts? All the time. But the pain of it!

When I had my baby, I was shocked at how painful a c-section was. People had told me, sure, but until I experienced it, I’d had no idea how ridiculous an idea it was to have major abdominal surgery to remove a baby and then not be able to sleep for three months while trying to keep the baby alive– no physical therapy, no real after care besides checking the incision and making sure I didn’t want to kill myself or my child. And anyway, what struck me was once again how banal the conversation about c-sections and motherhood are/were. So many women have had a c-section. It’s not like its newsworthy. Then they just get on with their lives, and even go back to work and/or take care of additional children. But the pain of it!

What care did I want that I didn’t get? My husband held the baby while she screamed and later cried so hard she vomited so I could shower and pump milk in the bathroom (and okay, pumping milk in any kind of space is hardly self-care), and people brought us food and told us the stories about how birthing their children almost killed them, too.

Did I have a chance to really look at it, and cry for the horrors of childbirth, strapped to a table, unable to move or see anything but the light above me until I saw my own baby, whom I did not push into the world? Have I ever told anyone how deeply sad the entire experience made me, even though it’s balanced by the joy of my child? Maybe I have said so, maybe a hundred times. But the sadness is buried in the busyness.

So now it’s now, and everything hurts. The pain wakes me in the middle of the night, and I check the time to make sure it’s been at least six hours since the last time I took something for the pain. If it has been, then I shuffle to the bathroom, take a few pills, shuffle back to bed and wait for the grip of the pain to ease a little. In the moments of intense pain, I am scared of cancer. And if I am not afraid of cancer, then I am afraid of surgery. And I am afraid of dying before my daughter is an adult. And then whatever I have taken starts to work, and then I am afraid of my blood pressure leading me to some early death in which I don’t see my child as an adult, where she has to figure out life without a mom.

My aunt had fibroids and adhesions and eventually a hysterectomy, and she is 75 years old and shrinking, but okay otherwise. My good friend from work just had a hysterectomy. She feels so much better.

Yesterday, I had a conversation with a friend who has lost about 60 lbs and has made deliberate choices to improve her health. She said that she had to make a decision to live because she knew, like you know, that she was dying. And she did not want to die on the couch in her forties, so she’s doing the things she knows she needs to do to live. She’s moving her body. Eating less. Paying attention to what her body and her brain are telling her. It’s hard, and it did not make her a happier human being. But then, neither did ignoring her own health and passively dying.

And I guess what’s at the heart of what I’m trying to say is that I feel very small and weak here in my giant body. Other women have fibroids, c-sections, abdominal surgery, and their houses are cared for, and their families don’t feel ignored, and I am comparing myself to other women and admitting that I am not strong, and I do not feel capable of creating or finding strength to do difficult things, and other women do/can/have.

How many times have I made a decision to live and then gone about doing the things that I know that I should in order to feel the best in my body and in the rest of my life? I am not brave. I make a decision and then subvert the decision, like an adolescent rebelling from the parent who lives in my head. Once upon a time, I made a decision, a series of decisions, and I lost 85 lbs and ran around the block in the morning and limited calories and applied to graduate school and moved 1000 miles away from home because I believed that I was chasing happiness. I really believed it. Is it enough for me to choose to live, and have that be enough?

I’ve had two doctors appointments in the last two weeks. I have a blood draw today. Another appointment on Friday. An ultrasound just after my birthday. A follow up appointment or appointments. An appointment with a specialist in the beginning of September. I am on the medical industry conveyor belt again, and I have a feeling that the end of this belt ends with abdominal surgery and something being taken from me again. I do not know how to prepare to grieve or how to advocate for myself because I want to advocate for compassion and company in the process.

I’m teaching a poetry class this term. In the class, I assign two journal entries per week. It’s good to write, I tell them. Clears the head. Helps you make sense of life. Is a time capsule for the minutiae that gets lost somehow in the weird pull of time. And I think to myself that all of what I tell them is true and that I might as well get to it, myself.

I’ve been teaching from home, online for almost a year now. We’re still in a global pandemic. It feels like we’re moving back toward normalcy, but we aren’t– we’re just adjusting to whatever normal means now. Masks and social distancing and being alone for the holidays. In this time that I have had to sit in my office by myself to stare at a screen, I have not written anything at all. I promised myself that I’d write twice a week. I don’t know if anyone reads this blog or would be able to find it, so it’s like starting from scratch, even though I will admit that I went back and re-read what I’d written years ago.

Adeline will be four years old next week, which means that we are just a week away from inauguration day. I was so sad that she had to share her birthday with the inauguration of DT, but the next day in the hospital, I remember scrolling through social media, crying with some kind of overwhelmed something beyond description for all of the people who showed up for the Women’s March. I held an infant girl in my arms while I watched a million women in pink pussy hats and almost as many men come out to say something about women being so much more than decoration, flesh vases for dick flowers as Hannah Gadsby would say. And now her birthday will mark the swearing into office of the first female Vice President of the USA, and not without the most contention that the US has faced since the Civil War.

I used to take comfort in thinking about the 1960s, that whenever my country felt like it was spinning out of control, I remember the stories of my mother’s late adolescence, which included where she was when Kennedy was shot (it was my mother in law’s 16th birthday), and then folks took to the streets, and the US went to a goal-less war in Vietnam. But now here we are, disagreeing about what is real, about the definitions of our goals, and in between the flashes of violence, we are reminding each other to keep distance, distance, distance.

They always tell you that it’s just stupid to tell people you’re pregnant before 12 weeks. At least wait until the 8 week mark, when you’re past the time when most people have miscarriages. Save it for the beginning of the second trimester to avoid the pain of having to tell everyone who was just so happy for you that you’ve lost the baby.

That always sounded like good advice. And then Sunday night, I finally. Finally. After five years of trying and hating myself and wondering what in the fuck was wrong with me. Five years plus most of my careless adult life of getting negative pregnancy tests so that I wondered if my body was incapable of producing HCG,

I. am. pregnant.

I am pregnant. Me. Pregnant.

And I can’t stop telling people. On Sunday night, I took a test because it’s just something I do sometimes and there was such a faint positive line on it. I wasn’t sure if it was real, so I consulted some friends who said that they saw a line, too. J also saw kind of a line but was dubious. Then the next morning, the line was a bit darker.

I told my parents and all of my close friends and, as of today, everyone I like at work. I have pretty much sworn everyone to secrecy even though I can’t stop telling people. I figure it’s like this:

One of the joys in my life was hearing my dad’s voice crack as he congratulated us both, and I loved what my sister in law said about joy emerging from within me, and I love that my mom cried and started knitting things and holy, holy, it’s been wonderful to have this little bit of magic for the last week. No matter what happens, I’m going to hold on to it for dear life. And it makes me realize that I’m going to be a parent. I’ve crossed into a world that I now share with most women that felt completely alien to me before, and it’s wonderful.

I walk around my neighborhood every evening, and the last few nights, I’ve been scouting which houses appear to have kid stuff in the back yards. I’m going to need to know those people. My kid is going to play over at people’s houses, maybe. Now the house we bought in the neighborhood we bought it is just fucking perfect with its proximity to a park and the cul-de-sac with basketball hoops and a million trick-or-treaters.

This is what happiness feels like. What a profound relief. What profound joy.

A few weeks ago, my great uncle died. He was in his 90s, and it wasn’t entirely unexpected, even though it was sad to see him go. When a guy is in his 90s, it’s not like you (should) think you have all the time in the world to hang out, but somehow I thought I’d have more warning of his coming death, at least in time to introduce him to my husband. My uncle was a theater teacher from the late-50s through the mid 80s. He took some breaks to try to produce shows professionally, and for a while, he had a radio show. He was way into photography too and had some success with it, but most of his time was spent teaching high school drama. I thought he would like my husband– they have that whole theater connection thing, and they could talk about staging shows, and they could talk about lighting and depression era plays. But now they can’t because Uncle B is dead, and even though J and I have been together for more than five years now, we just ran out of time.

I mean, I guess it doesn’t make sense to introduce my husband to my very elderly relatives just so that he can like them before they die. That seems pretty unfair to all parties.

But the funeral was held in Southern California at the theater that is now named for my uncle. Former students came out of the woodwork to talk about the impact that he had on their lives– the confidence he inspired, and the fear of his disapproval and the pride they still felt in the productions from this tiny little drama program. Everyone remarked that the true measure of a teacher’s success can never be determined, not even after his death.

Cyncially (because it’s February and I’m tired), I thought, shit. That’s the thing about being a teacher– they won’t even leave you alone when you’re dead.

And I carried that thought around for another week– one’s life’s work is selfishly taken up by those in whose service the work is done. I’m glad my uncle has a theater named for him, and I’m glad he has so many pictures of life through such turbulent times in the US and then such serenity in his retirement in the mountains just east of Santa Cruz, CA. But I wonder if he felt like he had enough time for his own family, for his own children, or if they felt (as I did with a teaching mother) that the kids at work sometimes got more attention.

Then, like a week later, my step mother died. She had my dad divorced in 1994 or so, and then she had a breakdown and took out a restraining order against my dad, and it was all very messy and terrible. She went off-map for a bit, and then she sent me a birthday card, and that’s how we’ve kept in touch since. Mostly by birthday/Christmas cards and the occasional letter or email. This last Christmas for the first time ever, she included her phone number for me to call or text. I thought about calling and sent a text instead. She texted for the last time on January 27– just short that she missed and loved me. And I returned the sentiment a few days after that. A week later, she was dead. Her sister emailed me a “Thought you should know” type message. Heart failure. Age 70. Signed a DNR. Now, 70 isn’t exactly young, but it’s not that old either. A DNR at 70 seems like… I don’t know. But she was more of a parent to me than my dad was while we were growing up, and I am sad that she is gone. She hinted that she was going to visit when she retired (she never retired), and now J won’t be able to meet her either.

She could be terrible. She open hand slapped my brother at one of my birthday parties, and at another one, called parents to come get their kids in the middle of the night because my dad was drunk and she had a migraine. She bought me school clothes one size too small as incentive to lose weight, so I always had a closet full of clothes that didn’t fit, and a self-esteem that was barely detectable. But that was how she showed me that she loved me, I guess. And it all doesn’t matter now because she’s dead, and it hasn’t mattered for twenty years because I haven’t seen her.

A week later, her sister emailed a follow up email that she had been diagnosed with lymphoma and had turned down chemo, etc. In light of that news and considering her age, I can understand the blessing of a heart attack. She lived alone, no children of her own, some casual acquaintences, no pets, and her life’s work was really reflective of her incredible organization skills– she did office work, mostly, and started over again so many times that I think her last job was one she had for less than ten years. She was cremated, scattered in the ocean. No service. No obituary.

And now I’m struggling with that. When I die, I want people to be super fucking sad. Like pulling hair out all ancient Greek style, and I want annual memorials to remind people that I’m still dead, and people will pull their hair out again, etc. etc. She doesn’t even have a headstone, and without descendants, it’s not like someone in the future is going to be on one of those shows in which they discover their roots that lead back to her, the Mother of All of California or whatever. When she was my age, her life looked a lot like mine (in terms of stability) but mine is without step children. She was married, owned a house, had a steady job and friends and a good dog and a working car. And then twelve years later, bam! Her life was all blown to tatters and debris, and she was in her fifties trying to find a new career in a new state, and ugh. And then twenty years later, she died, not unmourned, but not celebrated either.

I think I will take this life’s work over the one that includes the stuffing of envelopes, even if just for the mourners.

My period is (was) a week and one day late. A week ago, I had some on-cue spotting and thought I’d really started, but then voip! It stopped. And then I had a little bit of hope, even though I didn’t want to hope. I felt cautiously optimistic. What is strange to me is that the day when I thought I’d started my period I was more than okay with it. It meant that in a week, we’d try again and that this month, I’d try clomid again. I had a glass of wine and a steak. And then….nothing except sore breasts and elevated temperatures.

This morning, my phone app informed me that I should take a pregnancy test because I had 18 days of sustained high temperatures, surely a sign that I was likely pregnant. I didn’t want to believe it, but I did. My phone app! Telling me that there is a real chance!

And then today while I was talking about literary theory, right in the middle of a discussion about Marxist theory and cultural production and how the internet has changed the means of cultural production, about how a blog might even be considered literature-in-action, produced by and for the proles, I felt the unmistakeable twinges of period cramping. And then I felt what was probably flow. And after my lecture, I was about to go to the bathroom to confirm that I really was starting to bleed, my co-worker, J came in. He just got married in August. He and his new wife (who is 27) were going to start trying in the spring. But surprise! She’s accidentally pregnant! They’re due in May!

I know you’ve been trying, he said. My sister is 38 and due in January, he said. They tried for a year, he said. We’ve been trying for four years. This is only the third cycle on metformin, but still.

Mother. fucker.

I congratulated him– I really am happy for him, but I couldn’t help but be bitter about the timing. I’m bleeding through my underwear while I’m telling him what a great parent he’ll be. Fuck.

When I was in sixth grade, I was very ill. Wait, no. That isn’t quite the truth. I was moderately ill for a long time. It never felt like illness to me– it felt like what I now know as depression. Gray days filled with antibiotics and naps and occasional soup, with day time television and so much boredom, but time moving both quickly and slowly. I couldn’t muster the energy to do anything resembling a productive use of time, but I’d be shocked when the day ended anyway. Eventually, my tonsils came out and my low grade fever disappeared, and everyone expected me to go back to school. I had missed an entire quarter of the year. My mom said my face had been gray and then it was golden. Going back to school terrified me. I’d been essentially alone for months, and I’d grown accustomed to long days marked in mostly half hour increments. I Dream of Genie, Bewitched, Hogan’s Heroes, The Price is Right, Family Feud, The Young and the Restless (thus began the darkest of hours), News, Guiding Light, Gilligan’s Island (like the sun through the clouds), The Brady Bunch. He-Man, Gargoyles, and finally my family home again. My neediness for them annoyed them and I knew it but I needed them so much, and I knew that the way I clung to my mother disturbed her and she thought school would be the answer.

In the early weeks of my illness, a bunch of my classmates came to the fence that separated our elementary school from the lot where our broken and leaning house stood (barely) and shouted at me to come to the window. They waved and smiled, and when I remember it, I still choke up both for their compassion at such a rotten age and at what I was losing out on, as weeks of 6th grade might as well be eons.

The first day back, or maybe more like the end of the week, I felt like I’d given school a shot and it was time to return to my regularly scheduled television events. I remember that when I asked to go to the nurse, my teacher asked to talk to me outside. We sat down on the steps, and he said, “I know it’s hard, and I know you’re scared, but you have to do this. You just have to. It’s time to be at school again.” And I cried and cried because I didn’t want to be there even though I needed to be.

Being alone is a very comfortable and very dangerous state for me. Especially surrounded by prescriptions for medications that don’t seem to work for me. This August, I have been a child again, growing roots on the sofa and awaiting what is next, grateful for the dog’s head on my lap or my feet, and for his need for exercise that prompts me out of guilt to get up from my coma to venture into the world outside of my house. This is why I will never be a novelist and would never be a good artist. I need my profession of choice to force me to talk to other humans all day long. I hate it, and I need it.

When I was in my early to mid-twenties, I had an on-going secret internet affair with a Canadian. For months, he was the source of my fantasies and gave me some glimmer of hope that I could escape the misery that was living in my mother’s house as a first year teacher, making $24,000 a year and struggling with serious self-doubt and obesity. I’d never had a professional haircut or style; all of my clothes were from goodwill or wal-mart or some equivalent. I felt awkward and strange and huge all of the time. And then I’d go into my mother’s home office to work on my online classes that I was taking toward my state certificate, and I’d check my email and find some beautifully composed email about how incredibly sexy I was. In my inbox, I was beautiful and witty and capable. Of course I lied to him because I would never meet him, so I created an alternate self– it was me, but as if everything had gone well instead of…how it really went. In my inbox, I worked out, struggled with my career, was an expert dresser and had weekend plans. I was lonely because I lived in a small town and was an introvert, not because I was terrified of other people and hated being in my body. I created a self, and he believed in that person, and then I did too. And then I worked on trying to be that person.

Not long into our affair– or whatever you’d call it– he said that he needed to find someone real. He wanted to find a Canadian version of me, and he set up a profile to go shopping for a wife. I helped him write the text, and I helped him screen his ‘candidates’ and eventually, he found someone and married her, and then they had two children. We continued to email one another for a while, but after he found someone, the messages were shorter, then very short, then non-existent until one final email. He told me that I should write, that my messages to him were some of his favorite parts of his day, and that I had all of this stuff in my head that it seemed like I was saving for someone, and I should give that stuff to everyone in the form of essays or short fiction or maybe just a blog.

I was already secretly blogging, but that is not the point.

His encouragement wasn’t the only factor in my decision to quit my job and go to grad school for writing, but it was a major factor. And the idea that someday I’d meet him and he’d be wowed by my beauty wasn’t the only reason that I started running and lost like 80 pounds, but it was a good early-morning motivator to get my ass out of bed and run, like I was running toward sex with someone who loved me, and that would prove to be the answer to all of my misery. I didn’t believe it, but I believed in it.

Now that I am older, I know that no one else will make me happy. The desire to be my best self has to come from some place inside me. When I was younger, I believed in the future. Now, I believe in the present,  which, at the moment, finds me wrestling with exactly the same emotions I felt when I was younger, except this time, I have no fantasy that lets me escape. It sucks. I am not sure that I am capable of happiness.

 

It’s not like I’m writing anywhere else, either, she said dismissively.

It’s that I don’t know what to say– whatever is on my mind is so fleeting and I don’t have the attention span or something like it to follow a thought to its conclusion. Used to be that writing was the way out of that merry-go-round of non sequiturs. Now, nothing is.

It’s like– I’ve been trying to bury my head in pillows and sleep until my husband comes home mid-December. Most nights, I’m in bed by 9:00. I have no problem sleeping. I sleep until the alarm at 6:00, and then the dog and I go out into what still feels an awful lot like the night, and we circle around the neighborhood in the same pattern. Tea. Banana. Shower. Hairdryer. NPR and raindrops.

The school day lifts me up– it’s in front of the kids that I find my voice again and can tell them things about myself and make them true. It’s always been the storytelling that gives the events their meaning. Kids, I say, I haven’t seen my husband in a month. He’s building a set and is directing a play and going to classes full time, so he has no time to visit. I like this fantasy husband I’ve described. He’s the one I’ve dreamt about with creative aspirations and talent and the respect of his peers, and the respect of his wife (me). But if I want to visit him, I have to find someone to watch the dog. I have to put off laundry until I return. I have to come home to an empty refrigerator and weekend chores undone. My niece-in-law was going to watch the house, but she threw a party the first time, and she ordered a ton of movies (for not-free) the second, and I will not be lied to. I have a boundary line that, once crossed, is not to be crossed again. And anyway, if I visited him, he would not be home. The set construction; the rehearsal. And now a job offer. This is what we both wanted. The job offer is not enough money to change our lives. The job offer is enough money to keep us living apart. The choice is between pursuit of a career and the stability of a marriage that does not operate on the terms of long distance.

In front of the kids, I discuss the Ramayana, the Hindu epic wherein a woman is abducted from her husband and lives in exile. He searches for her and wages a war for her. When he finally reunites with her, he is cold to her. The distance has killed it. He suspects that she has been unfaithful, or he fears she has been, and his fears are so great, he cannot really love her again. She throws herself onto a pyre and emerges from the flames unscathed. I ask them– what is exile? I ask them– how are these flames a metaphor? What is that burning, is it the mourning in a relationship that asks for transformation to keep it alive?

Rain and NPR on the way home. Frisbee with the dog in the rain. Home improvement show, NBC Nightly news. Google Hangout with pixilated husband now with neck beard. No one is there to complain that it itches. He has one hour to talk before his next thing. He says he misses someone to come home to. He says he misses someone to sleep next to. He says he misses someone to watch movies with. He rarely says that he misses me– it’s implied. But I think about him what I have always thought about all men– that he would love whomever he married with as much passion as he would have for anyone else. He likes being married. He likes a warm body in the night. Then I realize that when I have gone through break-ups, I decide something similar about whomever I’m separating myself from. I could be anyone. It’s not me you love, I think. It’s someone.

But isn’t it true? Men remarry so quickly after the first divorce. And isn’t it true that if I were to live here alone that I would be just fine eventually? Go out with friends again. Read more. Maybe type away in this window on Saturday mornings with a big mug of coffee and a heart full of angst. Isn’t that a much more comfortable and familiar existence?

8:30. Conversation over. Brush teeth. Vitamins. Irrelevant supplements to regulate a cycle that for now makes no difference whatsoever. Note that menstruation has lasted for three weeks, but makes no difference except inconvenience. Bed with dog and the first ten minutes of whatever episode of whatever show. Middle of the night barking. Middle of the night checking of locks and releasing of the dog to bark into the night.

While the dog is busy barking at nothing in the dead hours, my husband’s roommate who is 25 and still fascinated by jello shots will post something on a social networking site that I will not understand. It’s an inside joke, and he’s tagged in it. I used to be his roommate. Other people are getting the best of him.