Читать книгу Fierce Joy - Susie Caldwell Rinehart - Страница 12

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We are married under two oak trees, not far from the ocean where we met. But we soon move to Arizona, then to Vermont, and the changes rattle me. With each goodbye to friends and family, I feel like part of me is left behind. At least we have each other, I think. But I am not convinced that it is enough. My strong, independent voice feels shaky and weak. I keep looking for a script. I wonder how to act when we are broke and he is unemployed. What would a good wife say now?

There is no time for adventures. There is no time for poetry or long walks. He commutes an hour and a half each way to graduate school. I have a job with a lot of responsibility, and I work sixty-hour weeks. At thirty years old, I am part of a small team, running a residential school with motivated teenagers from across the country. I keep wondering when the grown-ups will show up to take over. Can I really be in charge? If something happens to one of the students, it’s on me. I feel that pressure with every class I teach, every meeting I run, and every time we let the students explore the woods alone.

My colleagues are like the A-team of teachers. I am the new kid. They are brilliant, experienced, and unconventional. They quote Thoreau and T.S. Eliot over breakfast. They know how to play the accordion and solve page-long mathematical equations. I feel simultaneously giddy and anxious among them. They say things about other schools and other leaders that are not generous. It scares me. Is that how they talk about me behind my back? I don’t feel smart. I don’t feel like I deserve to be here. I feel like someone is going to knock on the door any minute and say, “We’ve found you out. Come with us. You don’t belong here.”

I stay up late grading papers, preparing for classes and board meetings, then answering emails from anxious parents to prove my worth. The voice in my head is critical. It sounds like a picky principal: “Susie is awkward and keeps missing the point. Her students like her, but they would respect her more if she knew the material better. As an administrator, she fails to consider all of the details. Susie needs to prepare more, manage her time better, and be more professional. She lacks the raw material to be a true leader.”

I miss my brothers, who always know what to do. I miss my girlfriends, the ones I call my sisters, who pick me up, brush the dirt off, and help me get back in the arena. We live in rural Vermont now, and they are all back in Canada, at least ten hours away.

I cannot remember the last time I did something for myself. I feel the walls pressing in on me in our apartment. It’s too much. I am not enough. I shut down the computer and walk outside. Kurt and all of the students are asleep.

Kurt finds me standing under the stars in just a t-shirt on a cold, October night.

“Come to bed,” he urges.

“I’ve got to get out of here,” I say in response.

“Maybe you should put some pants on first,” Kurt teases gently.

The next day, I check myself into a motel. I’m going away. I can’t keep up. “Don’t tell anyone,” I beg Kurt. My colleagues and students can’t know I am falling apart. I don’t remember how I got to the motel. I remember locking the door. I remember lying on my back on green sheets that smell like moth balls and pond water. What’s wrong with me? I watch TV in a dark room, hours and hours of TV. The commercials with beautiful, perfect women reinforce my feeling that everyone loves their life, except me. Maybe I don’t need to go back. I like it here. Nobody expects me to know the answers here. Maybe I can stay here with the “Golden Girls,” eating microwave popcorn forever. But I do go back. I put on makeup and pretend that I was away on a fun weekend. I stand up to lead the next faculty meeting, saying to myself and anyone who asks, “I’m fine. I’m fine.” I had better be, because I find out I’m pregnant.

#

Four years later, I am still helping to run the residential school in Vermont. Kurt is away at a graduate school conference. We have two children now. The baby is teething and has been crying for forty-five minutes. Our toddler is screaming at me to play with him. “NOW MAMA!” he hollers. He hands me his stuffed cow, the one that moos when you touch it. The baby wails in my arms, her face red. I can’t think. There is too much crying and screaming: WHAAAAA. MOOOOO. NOW MAMA! Something inside me snaps, and I explode. I grab the stuffed cow and throw it against the wall, hard. Make it stop. I need silence. I want to smash it to pieces. Instead it lands with a thud, but nothing else happens. “Mooooo,” it moans. “MOOOOOO,” it cries again, louder, it seems. I’ve succeeded in making it whine more. The baby is still crying. My son is also wailing now. I feel suddenly terrible for him. What have I done? In angry response, the cow says, “MOOOOOOO.” I need to get out of here. I can’t do anything right. I’m not cut out for parenting.

Kurt walks in the door. I hand him the baby and the broken cow toy. The toddler lifts his arms; he wants to be picked up by his dad. I escape to another room.

I call the number on the crumpled piece of paper. It is for a therapist. A friend recommended her to me years ago, but I never called, because I thought, Therapy is for broken people with terrible childhoods. I am just a little overwhelmed. But now I hear a woman’s voice on the other end. She sounds kind. She sounds smart. Can you see me now? I hear myself ask. I sound like I am begging.

I grab the car keys. I tell Kurt I’m going out. He waves goodbye. I can’t tell if he’s angry or relieved that I am leaving.

It’s early summer in Vermont. As I drive, I feel the thick trees on both sides of the road squeezing in on me. The forest seems dark and unfriendly. And even though my breath is shallow and I can’t get air, I roll the window up tightly.

Hilary’s office is in her barn, upstairs. The morning light comes in through the giant windows up near the roof and I can see the sky. I want to stay here. I feel like asking her to write me a note, to excuse me from having to go back to the crying and screaming and mooing.

“Do you second-guess yourself?” she asks.

“All the time.”

“Give me an example.”

“I should not have had children.”

“Why do you say that?”

“I’m not good at it. I don’t know what to do. I throw their toys at walls. I think about driving across the border and never coming back.”

“If a woman feels angry, struggles, and needs quiet to think, then there must be something wrong with her, not with society. Is that what you think?”

“What do you mean by society?”

“Our culture sends a clear message to women: good mothers are calm, loving, and willingly sacrifice themselves for their children. When you fall short of those expectations, the problem isn’t that we have created an unattainable myth of mothering, but that you are a failure and broken.”

“That’s how I feel; I am a failure.”

“What do you think when you wake up?”

“Another chance to feel bad all day.”

“Do you think you are depressed?”

“I don’t know. I have a great husband, great kids, and a great job. How can I be depressed?”

“It’s very common.”

“Sometimes it’s good. Like yesterday, when the rain cleared, the kids and I went on a rainbow and puddle hunt. I felt genuinely happy then.”

“Sure. But what keeps you up at night?”

“I feel like I could not survive without my husband or my colleagues, but that they would be totally fine without me. What does that make me?”

“Depressed. Let’s get you some medication for now.”

“Will that help me get more done?”

“It’s not about getting more accomplished; it’s about feeling better,” she says, laughing a little.

“But if I take the meds to feel better, then that proves that I am a depressed person. And I have no reason to be depressed.”

“You don’t need a reason. It doesn’t matter why you are struggling, it only matters that you are. No amount of working harder will change the chemical imbalance in your brain.”

“But that feels like a death sentence, not a solution.”

“It’s not forever. Things change. You only feel that way because you learned somewhere that you are supposed to be happy all the time. That’s a lot of unrealistic pressure.”

“But maybe if I did more to be better at mothering, or better at my job, I would feel better, and I would be happy. I wouldn’t need meds.”

“You don’t need to do more, excel more, or accomplish more to be more worthy,” she says firmly.

I want to believe her. I hear the truth in what she is saying, but I can’t shake the notion that I am broken. I leave her office feeling like I have duct tape on my forehead that labels me as “DEPRESSED.”

#

I am thirty-nine. Ten years into our marriage, Kurt and I are struggling. Maybe it’s my depression. But he’s the one who seems gloomy. I take my antidepressants every day, but I wonder why I still don’t feel happy. Maybe it’s just middle-age marriage stuff. I don’t know, because no one talks about the difference between normal problems and red-flag warnings. Our relationship is suffering under the weight of stress, children, and money issues. How do I know this rough patch will pass? What if things never get better?

One evening, I prepare a big taco dinner for everyone. When I finally sit down, I notice that Kurt is almost done eating. I wait for the kids to leave the table and turn angrily to Kurt.

“Can’t you see that I always eat last? Just once I want to sit down and eat first,” I say.

“But the food was getting cold,” he says sheepishly.

“That’s not the point!”

“What is the point?”

“Why can’t you just get me?” I snap at him. He opens, then closes his mouth, without saying anything. I don’t want to explain that in life, as with this meal, I feel like I put everyone else before me. I want him to put me first without me having to tell him to do so. Can’t he understand that?

Kurt and I are just too different. He thinks linearly and speaks directly. I think emotionally and speak indirectly. I’m an extravert who feeds off social energy. He is an introvert who prefers to be alone. I should have stuck to my perfect partner list, because all I see now are the cracks and imperfections in Kurt. I want to fix them all.

I bring him to a coffee shop and make him write down his career goals. I think I’m helping, but he feels like I am micromanaging. Things on the surface of our relationship suddenly bother me. I beg him to exercise more, to drink less, and to wear something other than his old blue sweatshirt. I know I’m being shallow, but I can’t stop thinking about all the ways he could change for the better. I spend my free time worrying about the future and criticizing him. He ignores me and dives deep into his dissertation. We go to bed at different times. We wake at different times.

One night, I’m up because I’m feeling anxious about our marriage. I notice the way Kurt is sleeping. He lies on his back with his thumbs hooked into the top of his boxers, like a little boy. It’s not his fault, I think. We just need a change. A fresh start will save our marriage.

#

We move to Colorado. Kurt continues to write his PhD dissertation on black bears. I am offered the position of director in a global education company. I am learning decades worth of material in months. The financials are dizzying. I should understand them better. I stay up late sorting through them. When I travel internationally for work, I leave Kurt and the kids behind. There is no time to talk with him about anything other than logistics.

Then there is the stress of risk management. I am responsible for the safety and happiness of hundreds of students around the world. In one quarter, a volcano erupts in Indonesia, there are air strikes in Israel, an Ebola outbreak in Senegal, and a terrorist attack in China. I keep the phone next to my bed; it rings at one in the morning because a student in India may need surgery on her appendix. It rings at three in the morning because we need to re-route a group to avoid kidnappings in Jordan. My journal, which used to be full of poetry, is full of risk management scenarios and strategic plans. I have constant headaches. I can’t keep up.

Meanwhile, our children grow and so does their number of soccer games, music lessons, dance recitals, and plays. I feel guilty all the time. Fear says, “Good moms don’t miss their children’s recitals.” I don’t make it to most soccer games either, because of work. “Every other mom will be there, except you,” Fear says, dousing me in shame.

The founder of the company sends me an email blaming me for low enrollment. He says he is not going to offer bonuses this year, and it’s my fault. His words feel untrue and make me angry, but they still sting. I’m not cut out to be the director. I’m failing. I try to advocate for myself and for the others, detailing our tireless work and successes. But I feel sluggish and inarticulate around him. Why can’t I say the right words to change his mind? Fear says, “A real leader would know exactly what to say.”

Two weeks later, the founder brings me flowers and praises me for my leadership in general. I feel light and successful. What can I do to win his praise again? My journal entries shift from strategic plans to strategic ways to please the founder. I hustle and perform for the founder, not for the good of the company. I live and breathe for his approval. I continue to take my antidepressants, but I don’t tell anyone that I am struggling inside. I don’t even call my girlfriends at home anymore. I imagine that I would sound whiny or needy. They are all so busy; I don’t want to be a burden. What would I say? Hi. Help. I can’t remember who I am.

When the phone rings before dawn because of a crisis on another continent, I can’t go back to sleep. I leave Kurt asleep in bed and I put on my running shoes. I follow the trails into the mountains. The rising sun feels like warm hands on my shoulders. I can breathe. When I run, I count exhales, not seconds. Time seems to slow down. Deer graze so close to the trail I can almost touch their outstretched ears.

When I run, I know whether I am doing well by the way my body feels, not by what anyone else says. Then comes the moment when all thoughts fall away and all that is left is my wild, animal body. This is who I am.

Running on a trail, alone, I am not responsible for the success of a company, or for the success of our marriage. Nobody needs me. I want to keep running and never stop.