I'll Keep It With Mine: 10 Years of Marriage

I’ve never really been into decorating, party planning, or fashion, but I’m a huge believer in the power of ritual and music to strengthen emotional connection and create lasting memories, so when I thought about my wedding-- which, I did, near constantly, from the time I was eight or nine years old-- I thought primarily about the first dance. I’m really picky about love songs. They have to ring absolutely true to me from beginning to end with no forced rhymes or cliches, and avoiding cliche in a love song is really difficult. It also has to remind me of one person and one person only for all time in order for it to matter to me. There are plenty of wonderful love songs I stopped listening to after a relationship ended and will never intentionally hear again. All my neuroses made it pretty difficult to find the perfect first dance song when I planned my actual, real-life, going-to-happen wedding in 2008.

I’ll never forget hearing Bob Dylan’s “I’ll Keep It With Mine” for the first time. I was walking from the parking lot on George Street to a class in Maybank Hall. A few days earlier, I’d found an old mp3 player and asked Thom to load it up with music, including a bunch of random Bob Dylan songs, many of which I’d never heard. The first few chords immediately made me think of weddings, and by the end of the first verse, I was standing on sidewalk, texting Thom through my tears. I think I finally found the right song, I wrote.It’s a Bob Dylan song. I’ve never heard it before. Thom, who had patiently listened to me play and list the pros and cons of close to a hundred possible songs (not counting the rest of the songs from our wedding playlist, all of which I painstakingly chose myself-- I have a problem), texted back something like, Well, I’ve never heard it, but if you’re sure that’s what you want, it works for me.His response only confirmed for me that I wanted this particular song to be the musical theme of our marriage, so I’m going to use the song as a tool to organize my thoughts and do even a little justice to the first ten years of our marriage, and the first twenty years of having Thom in my life.

It’s hard to write about something when you’re in it, because it’s hard to see it clearly. That’s especially true for me when it comes to marriage because my marriage is the culture of my life. It surrounds me, it informs every decision I make, it’s the entirety of my life. Especially because we have moved so much during the course of our marriage, there have been plenty of times (including the six months we spent in Germany, where I don’t speak the language) when Thom has literally been the only other adult I know and the only person who has any idea what I’m talking about. That makes him really hard for me to write about. What is there to say about him that’s not readily apparent to me every second of the day? What could I ever possibly forget about our life and our love and the way we work as a family?

I try not to listen to “I’ll Keep It With Mine” too often because I don’t want it to lose its sparkle. I don’t want to get tired of it the way people do with favorite songs they overplay. But when I do play it, as I did this morning, I am immediately taken back to the that moment in Charleston, listening to it for the first and being flooded with memories of all the life we had already shared and all the imagined moments that waited for us in the future.

You will search, babe/ at any cost/ but how long, babe/ can you search for what is not lost?

I hear the slow and  steady beat and I think, as I did then, of the low-key way I have been able to rely on my husband’s love for me since we first became friends as freshmen at Charleston County School of the Arts. I remember, as I did then, one specific moment from our senior year. We had Creative Writing-- our major-- first thing in the morning, and we were writing our senior theses, which meant we spent a lot of time lounging around on the couches in the “writing nook” and a small amount of time writing furiously in an attempt to meet our deadlines. On this particular moment, I was upset. I don’t remember what exactly had happened, but my high school years were difficult and exhausting, so it could have been any number of things. What I do remember with absolute clarity is walking dropping my bookbag on the floor and making a beeline straight for couch, where Thom sat writing in a notebook. He had a black hoodie that he wore almost every day, and I used to borrow it all the time because he was always hot and I always cold. On this day, he saw me coming toward him, my face already crumpling with tears, and did what he always did. Without saying a word, he moved over to make room for me on the couch and tossed me his hoodie. I still remember the feeling of sinking into that couch, the safest place in the safest room with the safest person in my life, pulling the hood of my head, and falling asleep while Thom continued writing his notebook, taking a break every page or so to pat my knee. He wasn’t my boyfriend, he wasn’t trying to get anything from me, he wasn’t being dramatic or prying into my business. He was just letting me know, as always, that he was there. He cared. I was safe. I could take a nap.

Everybody will help you/ some people are very kind/ but if I can save you any time/ come on, give it to me/ I’ll keep it with mine.

That feeling, of being in my safest place with my safest person and knowing nothing absurd would be expected of me, has really followed me through most of our relationship. The feeling, of safety, of comfort, of not-much-going-on, is so hard to write about because there truly is not much going on. When we first moved in together, I remember being thrilled because Thom would bring me a cup of tea when I got home from work in the evenings. I was happy because we would put Lucy to sleep and then eat black beans and rice for dinner while binge watching TV shows in our bed. It was thrilling, but so boring to write about, that he was always down to go to the zoo, pick strawberries, or get ice cream. He rubbed my feet when I worked jobs requiring me to stand all day. He tickled my arm every single night to calm my anxiety and help me fall asleep. When it became evident that my beloved grandmother wasn’t going to live long, he spent the money and time off we’d been saving for a honeymoon in Prague on a road trip to San Antonio, complete with screaming toddler, so I could say goodbye. He bought me a car, fixed it when it broke down, and then immediately forgave me when I totaled it the next day.

I can’t help it/ if you might think I am odd/ when I say I’m loving you/ not for what you are, but what you’re not.

He forgave me for a lot. Very shortly before we started dating, I canceled a wedding and ended a long emotionally abusive relationship, the legacy of which was an incredible temper, an elevated fight-or-flight response, and a total lack of knowledge or experience when it came to fighting fair and talking things through with love. Shortly after we got engaged, we had a minor disagreement. A few minutes later, he accidentally slammed a cabinet in our kitchen, and I fully flipped out. I screamed, I cried, I took off my engagement ring and threw it at him. I also threw a bag of shredded cheese at his head and kicked him out of the house. Then I went to my mom’s and worried that he was gone forever, that he had finally see what a rotten person I was and he would never agree to marry me now. Instead, I returned to our little duplex with Lucy to find him sitting in bed. He gave me my ring back. He told me he loved me, that he was never, ever going to leave me no matter how many bags of cheese I threw at his head, and then he forgave me. Or didn’t even really forgive me, because he hadn’t been angry to begin with. He understood. He understood me. It was the first of many times we would be forced to confront my history of trauma in our marriage. It gets better, but it will always be hard. Sometimes I’m pretty sure it’s harder for him in many ways than it is for me. Struggling to understand even when it’s hard, coming toward me when it would be easier to back away, listening as I try to figure things out, reassuring me every step of the way that he isn’t going anywhere.

Everybody will help you/ discover what you set out to find/ but if I can save you any time/ come on, give it to me/ I’ll keep it with mine.

Our fifth years of marriage,we were living in the Atlanta suburbs because Thom had worked incredibly hard and had taken us from food stamps to middle class in a whirlwind year that actually turned out to be pretty horrible. I’d thought the adjustment to the suburbs would be easy for me, and we rented a big house with a deck where I could watch deer from the back porch. But I was grieving the loss of my brother, physically and emotionally isolated, and physically the most sick I’d ever been. I cried all the time-- just like I do now, but in a bad way. “I can’t do this anymore,” I said. “I have to get out of here. I hate this place. I’ve made a huge mistake.”

That year, Thom gave me an ornament for Christmas. It looked like a bathtub and, after the trip from Atlanta to Charleston in the trunk of our car, it was broken. With the ornament, he’d written me a note that said something like, <i>I know we didn’t get to do anything special for our fifth anniversary. I promise I’ll make it up to you.</i> Having kids early had been great, but my one regret was that I’d missed the opportunity to travel more and study abroad. As previously mentioned, we had spent our European honeymoon money to visit my ailing grandmother and then had another baby almost immediately. But somehow, Thom managed to pull an amazing opportunity out of his hat and move us away from the horrible suburbs and to Europe for six months. We spent our sixth anniversary in Prague, where we’d originally planned to honeymoon, and got to ring in the new year in Venice with the kids and my oldest, dear friend, Lauren. He has the ability to make magic like that.

The train leaves/ at half past ten/ but it will be back/ in the same old spot again.

The last verse of our wedding song has always been a difficult one for me. It means different things at different times, but over the years, I’ve taken it to mean that we are who we are, life is life, and sometimes it’s monotonous, but it's still easier with partner. Life with young kids is often monotonous, and Thom signed on for that at only 21 years old, when we had only been dating for three months. Lucy’s biological father wasn’t in the picture, my ex had decided he wanted nothing to do with her, and Thom wrote her a letter (that I wasn’t supposed to see) telling her that he was secretly happy that she didn’t have a dad in the picture because I’d had historically bad taste in men and he was hoping to step in and be her dad, telling her that hopefully everything would work out and she would read the letter when she was older, unable to remember a time when he wasn’t her father. He asked me to marry him. Lucy started calling him Daddy. Eleven years later, he is her dad as much as he is Stella’s dad. He’s there for every school performance, basketball game, tantrum, family vacation, and couch cuddle. For both of kids, he has worked through some serious hardships to be the best possible father he can be, providing them with a stability I never thought Lucy would be lucky enough to have.

Another thing Thom manages to provide that I never thought I’d be lucky enough to experience is me the financial freedom to pursue my passions and activism without having to worry about money. It’s funny because most people think of the partner who works outside the home as having all the freedom, but he is always there to work from home or take time off to watch the kids when I say, “I’m going to Charleston to plan a march” or “I’m traveling to DC to protest the inauguration” or “I’m going to be working pretty much nonstop on this election and it’s all going to be for free” or “don’t talk to me, I’m doing volunteer counseling in the basement.” Not only does he serve a support role while I go out and do my thing, he is always standing right next to me or sitting in the front row when I have speaking engagements, feel nervous, or just need a little extra help. He understands and supports me in my passions and social justice work, he brags about me constantly to anyone who will listen. I can never thank him enough for that.

The conductor/ he’s still stuck on the line/ but if I can save you any time/ come on, give it to me/ I’ll keep it with mine.

It’s funny because I always think I don’t have much to say about my marriage, but now that I’ve started, I feel like I haven’t written nearly enough. I haven’t written about the time I had to have a c-section and was devastated over the possibility of a recurrence of post-partum depression or harm to our baby, so he walked into the operating room and whispered, “I’m not wearing anything under these scrubs.” I’ve haven’t written about the morning after Stella was born, when he patiently waited right outside the bathroom for me to pee for the first time (moms know) and then helped me put my giant mesh underwear back on while my friend Adam waited in the next room with a bottle of champagne. I haven’t written about the week after my brother died when I was so wracked with grief that I couldn’t stand to leave my parents’ house and go home, so he took care of the kids for me and let me stay there on an air mattress on the floor until I felt strong enough to face my life again. I haven’t written about the time I was truly, truly insane and he should have left me and didn’t leave me, but took me to Disney World instead. I haven’t written about the fact that he cut off contact with his parents to support his daughters and our values as family., and has worked so hard to never place the blame of that loss on my shoulders, even when it would be convenient to do so. I haven’t written about the fact that he still-- after over eleven years--  rubs my back and tickles my arm every single night so I can fall asleep. I haven’t written, at least not enough, about what it’s been like to know from the age of fourteen that Thomas Rowell has my back.

The thing about getting married when you’re twenty-three is that you think you’re adult with life experience and a plan, but you’re just a kid with a baby brain and no idea of what the future holds. The day I got married, I had no idea what our life would look like. I didn’t know if we would graduate college, where we would work, where we would live, or even who we would be. I didn’t know how to deal with conflict, how to keep a clean house (I still don’t), how to be a good parent, or how to pay my bills. But I knew that I wanted to learn all that stuff with Thom.  And I’m not going to lie, it’s been hard. We’ve been through the greatest moments and worst, most heartbreaking times, none of which we could have ever imagined. We’ve fought a lot. We’ve annoyed the hell out of each other. There have been plenty of times I think we both thought there was no way to make this work, we had made a huge mistake, and we needed a time machine to undo what we had broken. We’ve seen each other through the deepest despair. But we have also seen each other shine, celebrated one another’s wins, and worked together to raise two of the greatest, most wonderful people on the planet.

Would I suggest getting married at twenty-three? No, probably not. But if you do, I have a suggestion for you. I suggest you marry someone who will change your flat tire in the rain even when they’re furious with you, support you in including the  Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health* decision in your wedding programs, indulge your abiding love for roadside attractions, tell you they love losing arguments with you because it helps them see things from a different perspective, and work as hard as they can all the days of their life to make your dreams come true. I suggest you marry someone like Thom.

I love you, honey. Happy 10th Anniversary.

* Marriage is a vital social institution. The exclusive commitment of two individuals to each other nurtures love and mutual support; it brings stability to our society. For those who choose to marry, and for their children, marriage provides an abundance of legal, financial, and social benefits. In return it imposes weighty legal, financial, and social obligations....Without question, civil marriage enhances the "welfare of the community." It is a "social institution of the highest importance." It is central to the way the Commonwealth identifies individuals, provides for the orderly distribution of property, ensures that children and adults are cared for and supported whenever possible from private rather than public funds, and tracks important epidemiological and demographic data....Marriage also bestows enormous private and social advantages on those who choose to marry. Civil marriage is at once a deeply personal commitment to another human being and a highly public celebration of the ideals of mutuality, companionship, intimacy, fidelity, and family.... Because it fulfils yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity, civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and whom to marry is among life's momentous acts of self-definition....It is undoubtedly for these concrete reasons, as well as for its intimately personal significance, that civil marriage has long been termed a "civil right."

The Big Sad: How Dr. Blasey Ford Gave Me the Courage to Speak of My Assault

I was watching TV with my husband and children when my phone notified me that Dr. Christine Blasey Ford’s written statement to the Senate Judiciary Committee had been released. I scanned it once, and then paused the show to read a few lines to my husband. Over the years—especially over the last couple weeks-- I have read many statements written by survivors of sexual assault. In fact, a week ago, I shared my own statement at a press conference with Senator Blumenthal, proud to note that my voice was clear and my eyes free of tears. However, as I read Dr. Ford’s statement aloud, I found myself sobbing in the middle of the living room, my husband reassuring the kids that Mommy was just tired.

As I read Dr. Ford’s statement aloud, I noted how much of it I could have written myself. Our experiences were different, of course, but so much of the feeling was the same. I did my best to suppress memories of the assault, she wrote, because recounting the details caused me to relive the experience, and caused panic attacks and anxiety. As I spoke her words, I recognized what a struggle it has been this week to focus when my kids tell me a story or ask me for homework help. I remembered going to dinner after the press conference last week, how I spent the whole meal feeling as though I was outside myself, watching my body nod its head at the children and push food around its plate.

Right now, forcing myself to recall memories of one of the worst years of my life, the feeling is similar to the one I felt at dinner.  It’s the feeling that something horrible was done to me and no matter how I try to wish it away or ignore it, I can’t make it unhappen. It’s the feeling that even if I were to run screaming through the streets, shouting all the terrible details and naming names, no one with any authority would care. It’s the feeling that I should be able to get over it, but I can’t, and the more I try to think myself out of it, the worse it gets. It’s the thing I’m fighting through tonight as I attempt to put the awfulness into words so some phantom reader will know, at least momentarily, that they are not alone. It’s a feeling I privately refer to as The Big Sad, and it’s one reason I didn’t report to the police when I was assaulted fifteen years ago.

As many survivors know, The Big Sad is but one of many reasons a person may make the excruciating choice to stay silent after an assault, but it’s a good one to start with because it’s fairly uncomplicated and non-survivors can relate. If you’re raped, you’re sad. It makes sense. But The Big Sad doesn’t wake me up the middle of the night to call me both a coward and a liar, like Self-Doubt and Denial have been known to do. Unlike Guilt, it doesn’t appear in my brain to spin a Rolodex of treasured memories the instant before I name names, asking, “Do you really want to hurt this person? I thought you loved them.” The Big Sad is a cousin to Grief, but unlike Grief, it doesn’t trap me for years in the bargaining stage, attempting to renegotiate the details of the assault and make it more of a hiccough than a trauma. Of course, you can’t have Grief without its friend Loyalty, who shreds the accusatory letter right before I drop it in the mail, assures me that it’s better if I just keep my thoughts to myself where they can’t endanger anyone’s marriage or career. The Big Sad tells me no one will care if I tell my story, and that’s much easier for me to live with than the Fear, which tells me that someone will care, very much, and will dox or hurt me for writing this. It’s much easier for me to admit to sadness than admit that I am still ruled, to a certain extent, by Shame, which even now is trying to convince me to walk away from the computer and close my mouth. These other reasons are much more difficult to unpack in an op-ed, because unlike The Big Sad, they are nuanced and feel particular to my experience, but they are no less real.

These reasons have been my burdens and my security blankets for over a decade. They’ve worked together to keep me quiet. But Dr. Ford’s statement has turned my face toward truth. For a myriad of complicated, personal reasons, not every survivor comes forward after an assault. In fact, the vast majority never report. They carry the secret truth in bodies’ forever, unable or unwilling to make an official accusation or share the names of their rapists.. As difficult and painful as it is to say it publicly and permanently, I am one of those people.  I am a survivor of sexual assault. And you, Reader, are not alone.

Call Dad

I don’t think many people believe me when I tell them I talk to my dad every day, but it’s true. When we’re busy, we usually take a few moments to check in. When he’s working overnight as a pediatric nurse, he pretty regularly sends me messages during his downtime. Nothing urgent, just, “Are you still awake?” or “I see Stella had a friend over today. How did it go?” Days when my kids are in school and he’s home from work, it’s not unusual for us to talk for over an hour. We speak so frequently that he sometimes doesn’t even say hello, just picks up on the conversation where we last left it. “Yeah, so, it turns out the mulch was on sale so I just bought enough to do the front and the backyard and it’s humid as hell.” Even 900 miles away, my father is a part of my everyday life. He’s there, via cell phone, when one of the kids does something amazing and I have to call and brag. He’s there when one of the kids is giving me trouble and I need to vent my frustration. He’s there when I’m anxious, bored, or complaining about my in-laws. He’s there when I desperately need him. But he’s also there when I don’t need much of anything at all, just calling to tell me about his day, ask for my opinion, update me on the health of my uncle, who now lives with my parents, or ask, “So how old does your sister have to be before she doesn’t have to put my income on her FAFSA?” Sometimes, he just sits on the phone as I cry. Sometimes, I do the same for him.

              

It’s important to mention that things haven’t always been this way. For the first few years of my life, I wanted absolutely nothing to do with my dad. In fact, in my first memory, I am standing on the steps of our house in Pittsburgh, leaning far over the railing to spit on my dad’s head as he paints a wall with my baby brother sleeping next to him. That will teach him, I remember thinking. When Mommy comes home, she’ll take my side (turns out I’ve always been a manhating feminist­). In middle and high school, my father and I used to fight so often and so loud we probably shook the walls. “I hate you,” I would shout, truly meaning it, as my dad stalked around in his tighty whities, forbidding to let me leave the house. “I am out of here, do you here me?! I’m going anywhere else. Anyone else’s family is better than this one. I’m going to my boyfriend’s house, where they respect each other and everyone just does what they want!” It is only recently, as my own older daughter edges closer to thirteen, that I realize sometimes the best way to show respect for your child is to chase after her in your underwear, refusing to let her leave the house. Another way to respect your child is to forgive her when she leaves the house anyway, to refuse to say I told you so when she comes home devastated. You have to strike a balance. My father didn’t always get it right, but he tried, and sometimes the trying alone was a herculean task.

One time my father got it right—the most important time—was when he returned from a family vacation (one I’d refused to go on because I was twenty and barely speaking to my family) in 2005, hoping to spend a nice, relaxing day hanging out with his four kids and working in the yard. Unfortunately for him, that peaceful day was not to be. Instead, as my mother and I stood in the kitchen, waiting for his coffee to brew, what he got was this exchange:

Dad: Everything go okay while we were gone?
Me: Yep. How was your trip?
Dad: It was fine, but man, being around all those little kids made me realize I’m happy to wait a long, long time before I become a grandfather.
(At this moment, my mother, with whom I’ve already had a Very Important Conversation, bursts out laughing.)
Me: Well, that’s funny, Dad, because I’m pregnant.
Dad: Ha ha. Very funny.
Me: Dad, I’m not joking.
Mom (attempting to stifle nervous laughter): She’s not joking.
Me: Happy Father’s Day?
Dad: Oh. (an infinite pause) I need to...
(My father walks around the house for a good fifteen minutes with only one shoe on, saying nothing, his hands in his hair. He walks back into the kitchen, still only one shoe.)
Dad:I need to go to Lowe’s to buy a plunger. For the toilet. In the bathroom.
Me: You need to go to Lowe’s right now? To buy a plunger?
Dad: Yes.
(He leaves the kitchen. I assume he finds his other shoe. He goes to the store.)

And that was it. No yelling. No chasing me around the house in his underwear. No long speech where he informed me that I had ruined my life. No accusing me of bringing shame on the family. No tears, at least in front of me. We had a conversation so free of drama I don't even really remember it, and less than a month later, I had moved out of my downtown apartment and was back with my parents, waiting as my uncle and father converted his beloved screened-in back porch to a spare bedroom with a nook to keep a baby's crib and a window to the kitchen where we would eventually pass the baby back and forth between feedings. This feat-- the last-minute, frantic addition of a new bedroom-- is especially astounding when one considers that my father has been planning to build a deck around the swimming pool since I was eleven years old. He's been planning to convert the room back to a porch since that babh, my daughter, was a year old, and she's twelve now. He has been remodeling the kitchen so long my husband and children don't know a time when knives and utensils were kept in a drawer instead of a big Tupperware container on the floor. I share this not to pass judgment, but to illustrate the true miracle of my father committing to and finishing an extension to his house in under a month. What made the new room different from all the other projects, of course, is that it wasn't for him. It was for me. So it had to get done. 

Being a father-- especially a good one-- is very often a thankless job. Moms get most of the credit because in general, and this was especially true when I was kid growing up in the eighties and nineties, mothers do most of the hands-on work of raising the kids. When I was growing up, my mom stayed home to take care of us and my dad went to work, much like my own family operates now. And much like my own family (shout-out to my husband, Thom-- Happy Father's Day, honey!), my dad often came home from his first job to start immediately on his second. He worked all day as the Chief of Planning at the Army Corps of Engineers and then came home and painted houses, painted driveways (the nineties were a strange time), cleaned beach houses and cared for his ailing parents, all the while making sure that he only rarely missed a parent-teacher conference, cheerleading competition, concert, school play, poetry reading, or basketball game for his four children. We rarely, if ever, thanked him for that. Why, my siblings and I must have figured, should we thank him for just doing what a father is supposed to do? Dads work all the time and when they're not working, they're spending time with their kids, begging their teenagers to switch from MTV to "regular TV" at 8:00 so they can catch a peaceful hour of their shows in their special spot on the couch before sleeping for a few hours and doing it all again the next day, regularly waking in the middle of the night to a teenage daughter sneaking home way, way after curfew and having to take the time to chase her around in their underwear for an hour or so, responding to to every "I hate you!" with "Oh, no you don't! You're just being a brat!"

Being a father is the kind of job where you know you're doing a good job if everyone in your house is able to take you for granted. Need a parent to be the bad guy at a parent-teacher meeting? Call Dad. Need to make a creepy boyfriend disappear? Call Dad. Need someone to help you with your Algebra homework while you accuse him of "not even doing it the way they taught us so how can you possibly help me!?" Call Dad. Wreck your car? Call Dad. Poke a hole in the pool siding and flood the backyard? Call Dad. Lose your wallet in a foreign country? Call Dad. Break your arm? Call Dad. Run out of money? Call Dad. Need someone to come over and deep clean your house while you recover from a c-section? Call Dad. If you're doing your job right, your kids will never really understand that many kids grow up without a father, or at least a good one, to call. If you're doing your job right, your children and even your grandchildren will grow up knowing your house-- the house you work so hard for-- is a safe space, where trespasses are forgiven and you're always welcome home.

Happy Father's Day, Dad. Talk to you soon.

For Joyce and Robin on Mother's Day

When I was little, I had a recurring dream that I had lost my mother. In the dreams, I would wake up from a nap or return from school to find that she was gone. Not dead, necessarily, but missing. Her toothbrush, makeup, and perfume missing from her bathroom, her clothing gone from the closets, even her favorite giant coffee mugs replaced by dainty tea cups. “Where’s Mom?” I would ask, and my father would say, “Oh, she left. You missed it. And now she’s never coming back.” In my childhood dreams, she never left on purpose. It was never a decision. She just had to leave suddenly and she couldn’t stand to say goodbye to me so she left while I was distracted. She left without saying anything. I think it was my brain attempting to process my unmentionable, almost unthinkable fear that my mother would die. It was a fear I told myself was ridiculous and impossible. Mothers of young children didn’t die! Mothers of young children weren’t allowed to die. They had too much to do, they had too many people depending on and loving them—too many people loving them too fiercely for any higher power to take them away. There was no power higher than my need and love for my mother. You only died, I thought, when no one cared about you anymore because you got too old. You only died when you were a senile great-great-grandmother no one saw anymore.  As long as I paid attention to my mom, she wouldn’t die. And I couldn’t have stopped paying attention to her even if I wanted to—she was my entire world.

The one thing that flew in the face of my logic, that opened the door for my recurring nightmares, was the fact that my own mom’s mother died when my mom was a little girl and her father died when she was a teenager. She hardly ever talked about it, and she had a ton of siblings and a stepmother who made the hole left by her parents almost unnoticeable to her children. But I knew it had happened. She had gone to elementary school one day and when she got home her mother had died of a heart attack at thirty-five years old. She hadn’t meant to die. She hadn’t said goodbye. She just had to leave suddenly and she disappeared. This bit of family history panicked me if I thought about it too much, so I tried to make sense of it. Maybe, I thought, my grandmother hadn’t really been a nice person. In the three photos I’d seen of her, hanging in a big frame over the sofa in our living room, she looked nice. She was young and pretty and smiling—she looked like my mom. But no, that couldn’t be. Maybe because my mother had so many brothers, she didn’t need her mom like I needed my mom so the higher power was able to swoop in and take her away. Maybe, even though my mom still mentioned her love for her mother and her desire to have her mom alive and in her life, she hadn’t really loved her. She thought she loved her, but she didn’t love her mom as much as I loved my mom. And if she didn’t really love her mom, then it was okay that she wasn’t around, because she must not have been that great. I mean, what kind of mother just dies? That’s not allowed. That’s selfish.

My parents have a nice house. It’s my favorite place in the world—the one place I could walk through my eyes closed and never bump into a thing. I know all its smells and its quirks, and one thing I know about above everything else is that it’s an impossible place to tell a secret. No matter where you are, no matter how quiet you think you’re being, your attempt to keep something confidential guarantees that someone will, without even trying, hear exactly the thing you never wanted them to hear. That’s important for me to mention so no one thinks I was eavesdropping on my mother when I was right years old and overheard a hushed phone conversation that robbed me of my naivete regarding the unfairness of death. I was taking a shower in my bathroom when I heard my mom on the phone with a friend. She was in her bedroom with the door shut and I had the water running, but even so, I heard, clear as a bell, “… and Lindsey is the same age I was when my mom died, I keep thinking, I can’t die now, I can’t leave them now. I know it’s silly, but I still worry about it. It makes me sad to think about all the things my mom missed.”

Wait. My mom had the same fears I had? My mom was also afraid that something would happen to her and she would suddenly leave and my siblings and I would never get to say goodbye to her? I was only eight! My mom had just had a baby! Sure, my dad was great, but he could never take care of four kids on his own. Didn’t my mom understand what I had figured out—that if you really love someone, they can never leave you? I wanted to explain it to her, but I was getting older and deep inside I knew my belief that love prevents death was superstitious and would actually hurt more than help her. Of course my mom loved her mother. She didn’t talk about her that much because she didn’t have that many memories of her, and she didn’t talk about her grief over losing both her parents because she didn’t want to burden or worry us. She wanted to create the happy, intact family that she had missed out on, and I had taken the credit for it, believing that I had been psychically responsible for keeping her alive and well. All of a sudden that idea seemed not just childish, but stupid and hurtful. Important, beloved people died all the time for no reason at all, and you didn’t stop loving someone just because they got older. Love wasn’t a finite resource that eventually depleted, allowing your former loved ones to fade away into the ether, leaving nary an emotional mess behind. After all, my paternal grandparents were elderly and I still loved them. They were still people with personalities whose lives were just as important and vital as my own. They were people, just like me. My mom was a person, just like me. And just like me, she had loved her mom more than anyone. And her mom died. Not because she didn’t care or no one cared about her. Not because she was selfish or stupid, but because she was unlucky. There’s no cosmic justice to take people away when they no longer deserve to live. Some people, through no fault of their own, just experience an almost unimaginable, unfair amount of loss. And my mother—my silly, nurturing, God-loving, joyful mother, is just one of those people. It sucks.

If you’re lucky enough to have your mother in your life well into your adulthood, as I am, something strange and wonderful starts to happen. You start to see your mother not as A Mother, but as A Person. For me, the majority of that experience has been wonderful. I’m still close to my mom. Though they still live in South Carolina and I now live in Connecticut, I speak to my parents almost every day. I rely on them for emotional support in almost all aspects of my life. Whenever I have a parenting question, my mom is the first person I call, and even when I don’t take her advice, I value it. Sometimes when one of my kids is having an epic meltdown and I feel like I am going to explode, I pick up the phone to call my mom and I realize she was denied an experience that I so fully take for granted, and my maternal grandmother was denied the same. My grandma never got to meet her grandchildren. My mother never ended a horrible day by dialing a phone and saying, “Mom, you would not believe the day I had. Come get your grandchildren because I need a break.” They both missed out on so much.

But despite all this loss, I now know there were many things my mother and grandmother did get to share. I can see how wonderful my grandmother was in the wonderful way her daughter has loved and raised her kids. I know because so much of who I am as a mother came to me, subconsciously, from my own mom, and thus through my grandmother. I know that in the few years my grandmother was able to spend with my mom, she taught her a lot: how to cuddle, how to be silly with your kids, how to listen to children like their feelings and experiences matter, how to live in the moment. How to be strong in the face of hardship or grief, but how to avoid allowing that strength to harden your heart. How to be fiercely, brilliantly alive. How to love. How to be loved.

It Gets Better: Maternal Mental Health Week

I had a baby three days shy of my twenty-first birthday.  The choice to parent had been an immediate and joyful one, so my pregnancy was celebrated by the people who loved me most. Even though she was a surprise baby and her father wasn't in the picture, I was excited to be a mother. It was my #1 goal in life-- to have a daughter (or daughters, if I was lucky) and raise her to be strong, compassionate, and deeply loved. When she was placed in my arms after an easy, relaxed labor and delivery, I truly felt as though all my dreams had come true. I loved everything about her. I never wanted to put her down. She was born at 10:20 pm and I stayed awake all night just staring at her face. 

And then we left the hospital and things got complicated. Contrary to what I thought at twenty, motherhood didn't magically solve all of my life's problems. I was still poor. I was still in a dysfunctional, emotionally abusive relationship. I was living in the converted back porch of my parents' house. I had no job. I'd taken the semester off from school. I had no driver's license. And every morning I watched my parents, boyfriend, and siblings eat breakfast and head out to engage with the wider world. My friends liked the baby and loved me but they were young. They were still living the life I hadn't fully realized I was leaving behind. They rarely came by to visit. And my baby had colic. She had trouble latching and would eat every ninety minutes for forty-five minutes at a time. Every second I spent breastfeeding was physically and emotionally excrutiating and  I felt trapped in my home by this endlessly hungry creature-- my daughter. My much-wanted, much-loved daughter with whom I could not stand to be alone. I was afraid of her, and afraid that others could see how afraid I was. 

While everyone was away at work and school, I would sit on a glider in the family room, feed her, and cry. I was so lonely. When I couldn't stand it anymore, I would sit on the front porch swing and wait for someone to come home, audibly sighing with relief when my mother's minivan would turn into the cul-de-sac.

Whenever I could, I would hand her off and run to the bathroom where I could hide and press warm washcloths against my aching, burning chest. I would stare at myself in the mirror and curse myself. "This is what you fucking wanted and now you can't even fucking do it, you piece of shit. What unfair universe gave you this precious baby when you're too much of a selfish shitbag to properly love and care for her? You have no capacity for love or tenderness. You don't deserve this baby. You don't deserve anything." At night, I would sit in our bedroom while my boyfriend slept and watch reruns of Gilmore Girls and Mad About You until the baby finally passed out, and when she woke up moments later, already needing to eat again, I would feel choked with rage and resentment. Then I would look at her little face and say, "I love you so much." I would force myself to smile. 

As she got older, it just got harder. I moved out of my parents' house and in with my boyfriend. We fought all the time and I would call my mom to pick up the baby so she wouldn't hear the screaming. I wanted a happy family for my baby so we got engaged. Things got worse. They got ugly. I ended the engagement. I moved back in with my parents. Now the baby could walk and say "mama" but I was convinced she hated me. She preferred the company of my mother and I preferred sitting alone and telling myself what a horrible person I was. What a horrible, selfish person, throwing away everything she loved because nothing and no one would ever be enough to fill this ugly, gaping need for...for what? I didn't know.

Shortly after I moved back in with my parents, I started dating a friend from high school who was immediately taken with the baby. He thought she was cute and funny. He had always loved me, he said. He told me he wanted to raise the baby, adopt her, marry me. He was kind. I said yes. We moved in together and it was wonderful except I secretly knew I was a rotten faker incapable of love. 

One night when the baby was two years old, my fiance and I stopped by my parents' house with the baby. I'd purchased her flower girl dress and wanted her to try it on so my family could see it. She didn't want to. I was exhausted. She kept crying and reaching for my mother, wanting to spent the night with my parents. She could see what a horrible person I was. She could see through me. She knew I was a fraud and she was showing everyone-- through her unwillingness to try on the dress-- that I wasn't a good or even decent mother. I lost it. I screamed and cried and threatened to take the baby away from my parents forever. I just wanted to punish someone. I wanted someone else to be the bad guy. My family just watched me, stunned. "It's just a dress, quit being such a bitch," my brother said. But it wasn't just the dress. It was everything.

I was getting everything I had ever wanted. A beautiful child, a marriage to a wonderful man, a chance to go back to school and finish my degree. And I was miserable. I could see my happiness as an outsider, but I couldn't feel it. In the car on the way home, I tried to convince my fiance to leave me. "I'm not a good woman," I told him. "The only way for you and the baby to be happy is for you to be away from me. Maybe I should give her up to someone up the task of caring for her. I'm ruining her life and she's only two. She already hates me." We got home. I carried her inside and put her to bed. I cried myself to sleep.

And then, slowly and all at once, things got better. I started to feel things again. I wish I could say I saw the right therapist or was prescribed the right medication, and I did try those things, but they didn't work. The only antidote for me was time. One day my daughter woke up from a nap and her bedhead was off the charts and I laughed. She choreographed a dance and I watched it with joy. She fell asleep in my arms and her weight was reassuring. I looked in her eyes and I thought I might cry, but this time the tears were tears of love, not despair. She thought I was funny. I thought she was a genius. I had another baby, a little girl, and I could handle it. I loved them. I loved my daughters.

Earlier tonight the same child with whom I used to dread being alone showed me her awesome new tricks on the pogo stick. She told me she had decided to definitely take Spanish when she starts middle school next year. She sat on the couch with me and asked me to crack her toes and rub her back. Her sister handed me an imaginary Best Mom trophy because I remembered to buy Pirate Booty at the grocery store. I reminded them they weren't allowed on the computer because they hadn't finished their chores and they got mad and then got over it. It was a totally average night for our family.

Sometimes on these boring, average nights, I think about myself at twenty-one, crying in the bath with her leaky boobs and her broken heart, and I wanted to hold her the way I now hold my daughters. I want to tell her what I now know to be true. She is doing the best she can. She does love that baby. She's a wonderful mother. It's going to get better and it's going to break her heart over and over again in the best, most unimaginable ways. She's at the beginning of a miracle, of a struggle, of a life, of true love.