OleopteneA blog for Mara Collins

Loneliness

August 30th, 2008

Ok, forgive the blog-nature of making everything that happens in the lives of everyone around me somehow about ME, and please trust me when I say I really am not the world’s most solipsistic person.

My best friend, J., 2000 miles away in Richardson, Texas, gave birth to her fourth daughter on Monday, and if you want to see pictures of all four perfect and beautiful girls, you should check out the blog of J.’s sister-in-law, a professional photographer who captures the girls’ overall gorgeousness quite amazingly.

And though I got to talk to J. briefly while she was in labor Monday night, and her husband called to tell me when the baby was born, I finally got the detailed story in a phone call yesterday. Like most of our phone calls, there were our shorthands, and there was a lot of laughter, a little bit of teariness — not like sad crying, but more like the poignancy of just resonating. Frequently we both laugh and cry at the same time, and it’s just messy. And then something she said somehow took me back to what it was like for me recovering from Rainer’s birth. Better-rested, not so hormonal, there are things about what that was like I couldn’t articulate then, the not wanting to admit to being overwhelmed sometimes, not wanting to burden anyone else with what I was feeling, not wanting my feelings misinterpreted as a failure of gratitude or anything, and just the strangeness of being lonely when surrounded by loving people who wanted to be supportive.

What I wish, now, that I had said on the phone, was, “Oh, dearest, I think lonely is perfectly natural and acceptable because you have spent nine months sharing this most profound connection with another human being, and feeling a little bereft in its absence doesn’t mean you aren’t excited to meet the small mystery who was inside you, to come face-to-face with her. It doesn’t mean you aren’t relieved to have the discomforts of pregnancy done with, or grateful for the family surrounding and supporting you right now. Go ahead and feel that loneliness, and when you’re done crying please describe for me again the dimples on her hands, the hair at the back of her neck, the pearl-like shape of each of her toes, and the way she smells, milk-drunk and drowsy.”

The thing is, I think the loneliness resonated in another way with the funk I have been in this week. I feel like a person with an eating disorder trying to learn to recognize my body’s cues for hunger, for satiety. There was this moment of “Have I been lonely?” which sounds so strange on the face of it, I’ve been with the kids all week and gone out and done social stuff two evenings in the last seven, after having had a good visit with Raven’s father, brother, and all-but-sister-in-law… how could I be lonely?

And I think of the weird cultural connotations of lonely I had been accepting. The pathetic Eleanor Rigby, the alienated and angry Kaczynski (really just a grown up version of the trenchcoat mafia). Lonely as maladjusted, as dangerous. The shame of loneliness as it stands in opposition to the people-on-televison image of happy, actors acting out scripts of well-adjusted good times. But I cannot think of a better word to describe a deficit in meaningful connections, whether it’s being at social events and being distracted mid-conversation by a child of mine wandering too close to a street, or the small toll we’re paying as Raven is preoccupied trying to build a new business, giving us less time to talk to each other. And it’s not even always about who is around me or what opportunities i have for connection, it can be just my own capacity to connect being diminished by my being preoccupied, tired, defensive, resentful, or anxious. Talking to J., I was able to recognize that this last week before school starts is a transitional one, we’re all a little anxious and in-between, anticipating and preparing and unable to see clearly the summer we have just finished, while still unsure what the coming year is going to be like.

So I don’t know if I try and express this loneliness if anyone else reading will ever have experienced it thus… funny the fear you will be shunned for being lonely? And yet, it was this chink of light, the resonance between how J. described her postpartum experience and what I remembered, and being able to say to her the words I wanted most to hear most at that stage: You can do it, you’re amazing, I’m so proud of you, and I love you. And I am most grateful for our connection.

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