A Place To Cry

When my family left Texas, we made one last stop at my best friend’s house on our way out of town. I wanted to give her one final hug. I cried for the entire first hour of our drive, tucked up against the window in the backseat, the small stuffed bear my friend had given me held tight to my chest. I was twelve years old. I still remember her bedroom and the way the road she lived on turned to dirt a mile up from her house and disappeared into a cow field. At night you could hear the cows calling to each other through the dark. I remember how she looked when I went back four years later to visit, just me, traveling alone for the first time in my life, returning home. Her house was the same. The town was the same. We were both different people.

My best friend is moving. I keep finding myself as an adult on the opposite side of the equation from my childhood. Everyone else is leaving and I am staying put. Here I am, standing outside my door, watching people recede into the distance. This is the third time in four years that I’ve had to say goodbye to a friend whose departure creates a tender, aching absence in my life. Growing up, I would have sworn that being the one to move away was harder, but being the one to stay brings its own swell of grief.

It will be okay, I tell my friend. I tell myself. But I can see the way we are each tamping down our feelings, powering through. Our children play and we speak in hushed voices about the emotions we don’t want them to see—anger and sadness, our quiet resignation. So much of parenting is pretending to be okay, doling out your feelings in small, manageable spurts, enough to teach your children that it is okay to feel, but not enough to overwhelm them with the monstrosity of your emotions, the raw, ugly vulnerability of being human.

When our dog died a few years back—our beloved family pet that my husband and I adopted the year we got married and loved immensely for eleven years—everyone wanted to know how my then two-and-a-half-year-old was handling it. Who fucking cares? I wanted to scream. He’d barely known the dog. He wouldn’t remember this experience. But we had to be so careful in how we handled everything, in the way we discussed the dog’s illness, in how we explained death, in how visibly we allowed ourselves to grieve so as not to frighten our son, or confuse him. So as not to have to spend all our energy comforting him when he fell apart at the sight of our tears.

We have just returned from a big extended-family vacation where we spent a lovely week hanging out on a lake. My son spent hours each day swimming and playing card games. The baby did way better on his first big trip than anyone has a right to expect from a four-month-old. Even still, I feel like I need a week all to myself, holed up in a cabin somewhere with just my laptop, a stack of books, and the blissful sound of no one talking to me. The introvert in me needs some time to recover from so much extroversion, so much management of everyone’s emotions and moods, including (or perhaps especially) my own. Instead, we are preparing to say goodbye to our friends and tackling the big feelings that come with the final week of summer and the looming return to school. New crayons! I keep saying, with the dedication of a con artist trying to swindle my son into being excited about a product I know is destined to break as soon as I’ve convinced him to buy it. Notebooks! Pencils! You get to pick out a new backpack! I tell him once he sees his new classroom and gets settled, once the year is underway, he’ll see how great it is, he’ll be so happy to be there.

It’s a message echoed in the way I’ve talked to my friend in these final few weeks before her move. Once you’re there. Once you’re settled. It will be okay. It will be okay. It will be okay.

I don’t tell my son that I wish he could be happy about back-to-school so that I don’t have to hide my delight that I’ll have more time to myself very soon. I don’t tell my friend I’m struggling to sleep at night because I’m so sad to see her go.

This afternoon, I took the cat to the vet for his 6-month senior checkup. We adopted him even before we adopted the dog. He was 14 weeks old with big ears and a long tail and a hilariously little body. Now he is 16 years old and rigidly refusing to cooperate in taking the medication needed to keep him alive. I have opted for irritation instead of sadness over his condition. “Don’t be such a grump,” I tell him but what I really mean is don’t die yet because I cannot bear it right now. I cannot manage one more emotion that needs to be mitigated, bottled up, given in small doses like salty snacks in the hours leading up to dinner time. I want to give in and tell all of us to eat whatever we want, eat to our heart’s content. I want to fall apart without any fear of the repercussions.

We returned from our trip to find that the flower garden is still lackluster. It is simply not blooming as it has in years past. But our tomatoes are abundant. It makes me think about how in families, rarely is everyone thriving at the same time. When someone is up, someone else is down, needing a little extra attention, extra care. The trouble with being the mother is that if you’re the one in need of extra care, you usually need to find it somewhere else—among your friends, in quiet solitude, anywhere away from the small children who need you to usher them through their own struggles and require being fed in a timely fashion to help them avoid falling apart. The trouble with being the mother is that there’s always some other more pressing need.

My friend gifted me a necklace with half a circle on a gold chain. She has the other half. Together, we make it whole. I will hug her goodbye. I will tell her it will be okay. And then when she is gone, I will find somewhere to be alone, and with my necklace clutched to my chest, I will cry.

A quick reminder that my book One Good Thing is now available. My author copies are on their way and should be arriving soon. If you’d like a signed copy of the book, including a one-of-a-kind “One good thing…” inscription on the title page, reply to this email or contact me at ctaylorwrites at gmail to reserve a copy. $10 if you’re in Baltimore, $12 to ship in the US, and $17 if you’re international. PayPal or Venmo payment options are available.

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