Eating the Whale

I look for the keys to this thing and find them in the back of a drawer filled with oddments like rubber bands and paperclips. Or maybe I was looking through the drawer, found the key, and puzzled, what was this to, again? Right, I have a blog! And never mind that the blogging software I was using doesn’t work with the current operating system installed on my computer, that I had to reset passwords, that nobody blogs anymore*, that stats have become mercifully impossible to trace by another forgotten password so I cannot obsess over whether anyone reads this, you’ve got your privacy as I keep my own. Somehow, ridiculously my own blog still calls out to me, the words in my head still want to be in the world, even though the world and I seem to be in an uneasy standoff right now, where I feel drained and tribeless and not so connected as I once was. Which, pretty sure this is me and not you, and I am embarrassed to talk about it, only, there are just moments when it feels like I take care of everyone else in most of the relationships in my life and quietly fade into the background when I my own needs start rudely asserting themselves and I don’t know how to fix that one. And, no, I’m not sure I want to talk about it. I just suddenly find myself unable to return phone calls and feeling like my kids and husband are society enough for me and waiting for the tide to change so I don’t feel so utterly drained.

I smiled when a friend ended a blog entry with “to be continued” because that is sort of how it works, right? And yet when I sit down to the blank screen I want to have a neat beginning and neat ending, to churn out a perfect essay. And that’s not the whole reason I haven’t written. It’s been deliberately summer here, briefly summer, it’s been a season of doing not the minimum of what was necessary nor being obsessed with the economy and cost that doing one thing means not doing another, but a season of trying to turn off the intense program towards self-improvement and accomplishment that I keep pretending I don’t fall into and doing the things I love and loving the things I do, which narrowed to playing the violin and walking and hiking.

But summer is over, and I feel ready to read stuff that isn’t murder mysteries again, feel ready to see the offspring off in the morning and greet them in the afternoon. Their first morning back in school I had a dentist appointment and listened to the sort of music I only listen to in dentists’ offices, which, not saying I don’t enjoy it there, but am haunted by the Fleetwood Mac’s refrain from Landslide “Even children get older and I’m getting older too.” More, the season seems all Gwendolyn Brooks’ “A Sunset of the City” and I want to stand defiantly against any ideas that somehow the best part of my life is already done — and that is another thought that I’m embarrassed to admit to and don’t really want to talk about. Only I set it out there expose it to light and hope that reality shrivels it a bit: that this message that women are valuable as they are young and attractive (and that those go so automatically together!) or childbearing, that what you haven’t accomplished by forty, you’re not going to accomplish, is not something I invented or am singularly susceptible to, or that smarter women than me haven’t gotten hung up on the same ideas and had to invent whole radicalisms to counter.

A lovely phone call with my sister though. I tell her I’ve started messing around with the Tchaikovsky violin concerto and (notice how I say “messing around with” because if I say I’ve practiced it an hour or two each day after an hour of scales and warm-ups and work on the first Bach sonata after a couple of hours of practicing with the younger boys, then I’d have to admit I’m taking it seriously and it’s frustrating that I’ve only managed to get a few of the fast runs to happen slowly and painstakingly) she laughs with me, because she knows how big it is, but it’s not a laugh, ha, ha, it’s out of your reach, it’s more, she says “You know how to eat a whale, right?” “One bite at a time.” Another violinist suggests that the problem with this analogy is that I tend to be, um, intimidated, and that I must first kill the whale which is my own intimidation.

So intimidation is on my mind. And the fact that the courses I didn’t take, the degrees I didn’t pursue, the careers I forgot to have (which: you know the cartoon, “Oh, Brad! I forgot to have a baby!” that’s sort of the inverse of how my life looks to me on a bad day) all seem to shine as the grass greener on the road not taken. That it’s a shock to realize that the people who I went to school with who became doctors, lawyers, NY Times journalists and magazine editors, midwives, university professors, symphony musicians aren’t different from me in intelligence, talent, or even discipline so much as the choices they made about what to do with their lives.

And I think there’s a way of taking on the intimidation that isn’t about tearing down what other people have accomplished, or even seeing behind the wizard’s curtain how much bluster and posturing and self-promotion goes into doing anything, how much of life is selling yourself, a way that doesn’t even tear back into myself, “look at how you undersell yourself!” but something more positive, which is taking out the whale spoon and finding a rhythm that works for zooming out to the panoramic shot of the large goal and back in to the close-up of the next baby step to be taken towards accomplishing it. Maybe it is another one of those epistemological crises: I feel like if I could realistically take stock of what I have, in fact, accomplished, what skills I do, in fact, possess then I would have a warranted confidence. Which is like want to prove the things you have faith in. And has no bearing on the notion that the very same facts under different emotional lights can produce either despair or buoyant optimism.

Pasted above my desk is Flannery O’Connor’s “The first product of self-knowledge is humility.” And I guess humility is not a bad tool to have when engaging in struggles and whale-eating. You don’t expect everything to come easily or imagine that there is something terribly wrong with you because you have to struggle. It takes a humility to share that things feel like a struggle sometimes. But, I’m here, I guess, and one bite at a time, I’m going to get through this.

*Okay, not nobody. I know not nobody, and I love and faithfully read my faithful bloggers. But my aetataureate hindsight would pick out summer three years ago as a time when some golden conjunction of my friends’ lives resulted in a handful of blogs I loved all in really good conversation with each other and I don’t expect it will ever go back to that, and that’s okay, the future is bound to have some compensatory things as well in addition to being resentably different from the past.