My husband works out every day in the mid-to-late morning, and he uses our extensive speaker system rather than headphones, which means I can frequently hear what music he’s working out to. Instead of a carefully-curated, peppy and motivating playlist like the one I use, he just has a playlist of “songs that he likes,” which can lead to what I think is an eclectic soundtrack for weight lifting. I find it amusing, for the most part; a Taylor Swift song might follow Enter Sandman, and then we could suddenly be thrown into early-2000s hip-hop, after which is Crazy Train. But the other day the song Buy Dirt came on. I went downstairs and, upon seeing my crying self, my husband turned off the music.
He had the same level of baffled bewilderment as when I talked about White Wine in the Sun, as well as when we watched a recent Joni Mitchell tribute and Both Sides Now was performed. I just don’t get why it makes you so sad, he said. It’s a song about…clouds?
My whole life, I have been very emotionally moved by music, very frequently to tears, and not always are those songs obviously wrenching to others. Some are – Landslide, for example – but others, like Is Somebody Singing or Miley Cyrus’ The Climb can destroy me emotionally because of specific memories associated with them. Usually I can hear at least a few lines or maybe an entire verse of my own personal tear-jerking songs before welling up, but I didn’t even make it to “chasing dollar” in Buy Dirt. I don’t even know if I made it to the lyrics, honestly, before dissolving.
A few days later, when he watched me emotionally decompensate just thinking about the song in our silent house, my Man of Action deleted it from his playlist. I’m sick of it anyway, he said, but I really know he just didn’t want me to accidentally hear it.
It IS a moving song, but I was much more emotionally fragile than I have been in a long while, for a few reasons. Typically every month before my period, I have a day or two of fatigue and disrupted sleep, a couple of hot flashes and an elevated resting heart rate. This month, I have had to date fourteen solid days of that with no period in sight, plus a very upsetting new symptom I had never had before: no appetite. This lasted for days. Not only did I have no appetite, but I had revulsion for food. I love food! I love to eat! I am, like Andy Sipowicz, an enthusiastic eater! But there I was, pushing my pasta around my bowl like a picky child, asking if it tasted weird to anyone else. This lack of appetite was accompanied by an intense, constant, and unquenchable thirst, to the point that I started googling am I diabetic, signs of kidney disease, and is HRT right for me?
This was reason number one for my emotional fragility: I was running on days of poor sleep, a racing heart rate, and almost no food, with a bloated and extended torso from all the water I was gulping down. Not to mention the hormones! Or, lack thereof, I guess.
But there was another reason I was fragile, and that is that my older son left on Saturday for an eight-week solo backpacking trip around Central and Eastern Europe. I am truly so happy for him; we encouraged him in this, and he planned it all so well. It’s something I really wish I had done at his age, and I think it will be such a great learning and growing experience for him. He’s seeing the world! The birdy is really flying far!
But the truth about it, it all goes by real quick. Every single month we all marvel that it’s a new month, how did that happen, time goes so fast, it’s almost May, can you believe it. My god, time really does go by real quick. My son is off seeing the world, all by himself. This feels like a whole new era, and it’s a wonderful new era, but the pages are flying off the calendar at cartoonish speeds.
I have loved every single age and stage my sons have gone through, every one of them. (Even when we were thirteen? my younger son asked. Yes. Maybe even especially then! I have so much love for the growth and expansion of those early teen years.) I am so proud of them; I can barely believe my good fortune. Sometimes I feel like I will literally explode, I love them so much. I will literally explode and all that will be left of me will be a pile of heart-shaped confetti.
When I was a kid I loved the book Jane of Lantern Hill, and I remember reading the part where Jane asks her mother if they could ever stop time. At the time, I thought that was absurd, why would anyone want to do that? I couldn’t get older fast enough. I wanted to be grown, to be autonomous, to be on to the next thing.
Well. I don’t want to stop time, but it all goes by real quick.
I have had some tests and I am confident my doctor, who is a brilliant and progressive young woman, will have some solutions for my physical self. In the meantime, the present moment is what we have, and so I will be over here, sweatily appreciating it. Thank you, body, for bringing me this far in life. Thank you for being a wonderland that is doing miraculous things as my estrogen plummets the depths of the ocean. Thank you, deodorants, for existing. Thank you, modern world, for giving me washing machines to wash my extremely sweaty jammies every day and for the clean tap water that I can gulp down to compensate for this excessive perspiration.
My son has landed safely in Europe to start his adventure. My best friend Tara (HI TARA), whose eldest daughter has travelled solo extensively, texted me with the uplifting message that we raised our children to be independent, so we shouldn’t be surprised when they are. We did! Look at them fly!
Watch their pencil marks and the grass in the yard all grow up.
Weekly Reading
Simple Abundance. My dear friend Michelle (HI MICHELLE) had mentioned this book to me last year, and I decided to start reading the short daily essays on my birthday over the next year. It was a really lovely, uplifting experience. I think it probably would have been a bit better had I started in January as the book intends – each month builds on the months before – but it was still a wonderful reminder to look at the simple things in life and take joy in them.
Wilderness Tips. his is a reread, but it’s been a while! There are some really great stories in this collection, and in my current state of mind I was particularly moved by the last paragraphs in the last story, Hack Wednesday.
When The Cranes Fly South. DO YOU WANT TO READ A SUPER SAD BOOK THAT WILL MAKE YOU STARE OFF INTO THE DISTANCE FOR A LONG TIME? This is the book for you! In retrospect, maybe not the best choice for this past, emotionally fragile week. Wow, it’s sad. An elderly man, whose wife is now in dementia care, lives alone with his elkhound dog, and has home care come in four times a day (this is Sweden, and such things are realities! Yay Sweden). His son, quite rationally and reasonably, thinks that the giant dog is really too much for the situation. After all, the old man sleeps most of the day, the dog gets very little exercise, and he’s worried the old man will fall when he’s taking the dog out. Very reasonable and rational. But also, the dog is the man’s main companion and great love. As the man snoozes the day away, he dreams about his long life; his loving mother and kind of awful dad, his move to Northern Sweden as a young man, meeting his best friend and his wife, and his son’s childhood. It is a very moving story about breaking cycles, new generations, love, and what matters in life. Fun fact: this is translated from the Swedish by Alice Menzies, and that was the name of one of my great-grandmas!
Zero-Sum. Before he left, my older son was telling us about his Managerial Economics course, and – as my husband and I both have Masters in Economics – I was extremely interested. It sounded like Managerial Economics was similar to Industrial Economics that I took back in 1996 or 1997. In any case, game theory featured heavily, which was very exciting to me. And then, my library holds came in and Zero-Sum was one of them! It was like my very own Baader-Meinhof phenomenon. Anyway, I have never before read Joyce Carol Oates, which seems like a grave omission. Every short story in this collection contains a zero-sum game, and it is absolutely fascinating and almost breathtaking in its literary creativity. The writing is just so smart, and every story is such a brilliant and interesting topic. Some of the stories were a bit dystopian/ horror based for me, but most of them were diabolically good.
I am going on my own, much less exotic adventure this week: a road trip to visit my parents. That is, if the weather-warning level spring snowstorms stop for a couple of days. Hopefully there won’t be any avalanches! In the meantime, take care of yourselves and I’ll see you next week – when it will be May. Can you believe it? xo
