Memory is often less about the truth than about what we want it to be.

It’s all in one corner.

I spent my day off cleaning my spare room, what used to be “his” room, another emblem in the constant unbalanced act that was our marriage. His ROOM, compared with my desk crammed in a corner of the bedroom. HIS space. A wall against me, wielded as a sword or at the very least, as a silencer.

Since he left in January, since the day we moved into this house together, 6 years back from now, this last pile of crap sat in the corner, growing dust. I let it stay, and let it stay, and mentioned it, and got bitched at, and mentioned it again and told I’m a naggy bitch and it’s his house too.

But it’s never been his house. It never was, and it never could be. These bricks, this mortar, the shitty crumbling walls and the 6 layers of paint on the sills-they’re mine. The dreams I cooked while a child rested under my heart. The places we’d go, the people we’d be, knotted into these walls. But he never fit, instead cramped into a room full of dusty boxes of words and songs from a lifetime ago. He wasn’t here, in this place.

I sit where he spent nights away from me. But now the floor is clean, subdued, my books and words surround me. I sat and threw out the memories I had kept, the candy boxes from that first year together, a time that wafted around us and disappeared like smoke on our tongues. Held in my hand briefly , cradled, but no magic was left in that cardboard. No pain, no pull.

A sigh. The closing of a book, heard from a distance.

Piled neatly it all waits, his last moments in my life, foreign as jungle to me now, the he who was.

***

It gives me such a headache, all of it.

The breaking free of each other has been easy. He pulled away years before leaving, leaving me the defective, the dreamer. I wanted family, I wanted the car ride through the woods, the hot cider after skating. Arguments about paint colors and curry. I wanted a home and a story to carry.

But the detritus of married life, the mortgage and the credit and the custody-the tethers you still are indebted too even after, the choices which aren’t so simple anymore. The staggering weight of alone, after days and years of at least believing you were in it together. The bills, the planning, the dentist and the vet. All such things you once spoke of, together, the commonality in the banal.

It whispers at night to me, the protection that marriage pretended at. Shakes me awake with the reminder that doing it alone together was worse than trying by myself. The deep night hugs me to it, alone in a too big bed, embers of a life where alone meant wondering at 4am if he might ever come to bed. A mortgage paid in brick, stolen in storm and fear.

I crave simple answers. I crave a bare wood floor of nothing, walls of stark grey, a quiet porch in a summer wind. I want to pack it all up in a corner, this house, this dream, this life, and leave it for someone else’s hands. I want the newness, a memory built fresh in bare walls and strong arms. I want better.

I’m starting over, but patience has never been my strong point. If I had my way, that past would be folded crane like into my palms, and tucked in the corner of an old moving box, kissed on the road out the door.

I would be clean of it, 3 times over.

***

I might sigh heavily and say I regret it, all of it. I might mourn the 20 something I never really was, the wife I couldn’t be, the woman I only dreamed of. I might blame him, I might blame myself. I might say I don’t believe in second chances.

But I’d be lying. I’d be lying if I didn’t still believe, oddly, that this was still always the right road after all.

Crimson and Clovers: Toy Review

So…this is another one of those posts that some of you might want to not read…in which case, run off here and buy me something cute. Namely this one. Cause it’s awesome.

“A memory is what is left when something happens and does not completely not happen.”

 

“Why did you never tell your parents?”

“When would I? When my mother was dying of cancer? After when our family was already splintered? When my father was drunk and sobbing at 2am? I couldn’t do that to him, give him something else he couldn’t protect me from.”

“It’s not the child’s job to protect the parent.”

“Maybe not. But it was mine.”

 

My grandfather died this week.

Or, as I’ve long thought of him, my mother’s father.

He has never been a grandpa to me. Or a Pa, or a Poppi or anything. He has always been an old man my skin cringed away from. He has always been the first man, the one with wandering hands.

I justify it, that it doesn’t hurt, that it doesn’t harm me, because I only remember one time, on the couch, while everyone else was in the dining room. I was giggling, playing, until I wasn’t, and his hands tightened on my arms, then around my chest and like fire stealing air from a room, I was suddenly bereft.

I find myself crying absently at work full with memory. My voice breaks and I run to the bathroom. I make it home somehow and I run the shower long and hot and silently sob, letting loose a scream no one will ever hear. Facts take their stolid, well dressed place in my head, examine their nails and recite:

My grandfather is dead.

He’ll never touch me again.

He’ll never touch my daughters.

This worry, this pain I know I am not alone in, that somehow, they will find us again, pin us down with malice and silence and take, it slips between my lips and I am sudden and surrounded by light, by relief shaped like candy. In my eyes that little 6 year old skips, in a red dress and shiny bob and giggle and disappears into light, free.

Free.

I am free of the hands that hurt me. They are all dead.

All dead.

But so am I, inside it seems.

***

I have never told my family. I have mentioned it once to my father as he slid off the end of my bed, drunk, sobbing his failures into his hands. I remember comforting him, wishing he’d go to bed already, I had school in the morning. I started to tell my brother once, and stopped, realizing you can’t speak to a rock.

I have told friends, obliquely or not, I have let loose silk ribbons of my truth, but never a chorus of it. Always trapped in my mouth, the lack of detail, the sore of scabbed memories, fenced in. I cannot be a survivor of something I do not remember, can I?

I remember moist hands, trapped breath, the inside of my eyes. Wrong. I can taste the wrong inside me. The world collapses into a moment I carry like a photo, tattered.

Once my father made me hug him, years later.

Wooden. Turn to stone, to water, to incorporeal ether. He can’t touch what he’s already stolen.

***

I will never tell my father. I could you know, let it slip, color his coffee. Let him carry it.

I won’t. I never will. Today I bury this. Today I have stared into it’s maw, felt my tears and said enough. I have lived with a rock under my heart for far too long, a child in a corner, wistful and quiet. She deserves more.

So he will never know. As a parent, I’d damn well want my daughter to tell me, but as a child,  I cannot burden him with anything more. This life has been sweet and sour enough for him. I can protect him. This I can do.

***

I am relived. I am livid. I am terrified. I am 33 and I am 6. I am crying and smiling and retching as water spills over my back. Noise rushes between my ears and I am seized by finality, and the gaping future before me.

I am free.

“Be brave. Even if you’re not, pretend to be. No one can tell the difference.”

I lug my ass out of bed before the sun comes up these days, the grey pre dawn hanging sullenly in my window. Most days I can turn the alarm off before it rings nausea through my belly. I peel a sleeping child from my arm most mornings, wonder why I’m so tired.

I shout orders for 30 minutes straight, get dressed, eat breakfast, brush hair, EAT YOUR GODDAMMED FOOD! leave the kittens alone, socks, the SOCKS ARE RIGHT THERE IN FRONT OF YOU!, where is your backpack?

hurryhurryhurryhurry.

I hardly hear the words they speak, at me, through me as I half drag, half trudge to school with them, kiss them goodbye absently as I race to meet the bus.

I start each day wishing I didn’t have to do this. Every day a drudgery, each day another requirement of a mother, of a person I struggle to be. I find myself hating it, and wonder, do I just not care?

I don’t have the time to care, nor much time for my children. Work through the morning, back to pick them up, play for 30 minutes, then home for lunch and chores for me, work for them, nap maybe, and then I’m off again, back to work, past their bedtime, home to a house I don’t feel I even live in, let alone own. Children essentially raised by people who aren’t me, their father, my father.

Do they even know they’re girls, soon to be women?

Drained, I eat bare rice with soy and try to convince myself I’m doing right by them.

***

Please don’t tell me it’s normal, that I’m just tired and this is how anyone would feel. It’s not. I didn’t go with my kids for Halloween this year, first time, ever.

I didn’t feel a damn thing. I was glad to be a free of it.  I don’t miss them when they’re gone-instead when they return I feel a weight descend on my shoulders, a horrid sludge like thing which slows me down, and I am petty, short tempered and mean. I find it harder and harder to like them, and crave silences.

I wonder if it makes me a horrible mother, contemplating being the one who leaves, the one who pays money and has two weeks in the summer and Christmas.

I wonder how long I can pretend this isn’t the truth.

I love my children, but increasingly, I do not believe I should be their primary caregiver.

Outloud. It’s been said.

I am not a good mother. I do not believe I ever have been, or frankly, ever could be. I am vacant and distracted, and sadly impatient with it all.

But to say it, to cast these thoughts into the wind like prayer is one thing. To release them, to say in not so many words to the world at large that despite my vagina I am not the best parent-these things will make me outcast, shunned in a way their father would never be. It would be ok for him.

This will never be ok for me.

***

I just don’t have it. I don’t have that girl urge, that mom urge. For years I pressed it into service since one of us had to be the parent, but now, as their father steps up more, and I find my SELF breathing again for the first time in….ever, I realize that person, that Mom self-she doesn’t exist. Maybe she never did, and it was that split, that forced march into mother that turned me crazy.

How am I to know?