1040

My father no longer consistently recognizes me.  I barely feel the sting of this; it is simply one more link in a chain of loss that stretches back, now, a decade and a half.  Loss upon loss, the whole thing still unfurling from my gut like a tapeworm.

I say "still" because this loss continuous and current- my father is still declining, and, lately, I've begun to feel myself tipping off the edge of my own cognitive plateau, beginning to slide.

But here is one new thing: After 15 years, the present is losing its grip on the past.  What I mean is this: always before, my father's debility leached backward, discoloring not only the man I loved as an adult, but the man I loved as a child and a teenager.  A letter he wrote to me while still cogent, a picture of him cradling my infant skull, a draft of the toast he gave at my wedding- these were agonizing artifacts, a reminder of the man who no longer was.

But finally, unaccountably, the present is receding, abandoning the past in its wake.  Going through my own tax records this year, I came upon an old return my father had filed for me when I was eighteen.  I do my own taxes now, just as he did.  I have opened college savings accounts for my children, just as he did.  And I am preparing for an uncertain future using what tools I am able to access- just as he was once able to.

The tax return is brief but assiduously completed; he used the numbers to open, and contribute to, my very first retirement account.  Here is another copy for you in case you want it, he scrawls across a duplicate form from 2002.

I know what he means: I love you.  I love you, and I always will.

In Which I Lose a Student

The thing about being in a service profession, particularly one in which you have sustained contact with individuals over time, is that people eventually quit you.  They gain new priorities, tire of lessons, have life events, grow old, die.  Reliably, this hurts.

It hurts whether you've been expecting it or not.  It hurts whether you've been teaching for one year or twenty.  It hurts whether you enjoyed the person or not, though it hurts much less when you didn't.  It hurts whether or not you had a part in the departure, though it hurts more when you know you did.  And it hurts whether you've served the person for years or just a few sessions, though there's a clear correlation, for me, between length of relationship and degree of hurt.

I was expecting this latest departure.  The student had recently taken a voluntary break, which is a key sign of disengagement.  If a student takes an involuntary break, they may well return; a student who takes a voluntary break usually returns for a time, but eventually quits.  I enjoyed the student, and she was long-term; I also precipitated the departure by enforcing my cancellation policy.  I don't regret doing that, because the policy is necessary for my sanity and financial health, but I guessed when I enforced it that it would cost me my student.

So it hurts.

The specifics shift, but the loss persists.  In part this is because, in order for a student to end an existing relationship, they must formally reject you.  It makes the up front sting worse, but is a better option, over time, than the ghosting or disappearing a friend can do.

I know ending the professional relationship is hard for students, too, because I've found that many try to wiggle out of it: they "go on hiatus," or "take a break," and "forget" to return to lessons.  I find this gutless, and prefer it when students make a formal break.  Lately I've grown tired of letting the dodgers off the hook, so I've taken to forcing he issue- checking back in on my students who are on hiatus and making them commit themselves one way or another.  It's cleaner, and ultimately kinder.

For someone who fears rejection, I have ironically set myself up for a lifetime of it.

On the other hand, everything ends.  Every student I have will ultimately leave me, every connection I maintain will be severed, every single thing I cling to in this life will be taken from me.

So maybe it's good practice.

In Which I View Art

I went to the city's art museum today. I usually thrill to art museums, and I am particularly fond of this art museum, because it is free, and because I believe a free art museum is a treasure without price, or at least without a price that I have to pay.

So I went.  But for the first time in as long as I can remember, I grew impatient.  Maybe it's because I had my family with me, and families are nothing if not destroyers of solitary joy.  At its best, an art museum is that singular combination of refuge and spaceship, harbor and port.  But maybe it only works like that, for me, if I am alone.

But maybe it's that I am middle-aged, and the middle-aged grow weary of trying to be people we are not.

Today, as I strolled around gazing at the art, reading the miniature disquisitions on intersections and interrogations and indictments and influence, all I could summon was irritation.  Does art-speak have to be so smug?  Have we really lost faith in the power of art to communicate without a varnish of insufferable prose?

I am glad, after all, that I did not enter academia.

Jewel Box

The Jewel Box is a glorified greenhouse tucked into an odd corner of an urban park.  It costs a dollar to enter, and the price is right- there is a reason it is not numbered among the park's main attractions.  You enter the greenhouse and find...a greenhouse.  Plus toilets, a drinking fountain, and an scattering of sad white chairs that scream"busy wedding venue."

But in winter, on a weekday during the daytime, it is quiet and light and warm and smells of blooming.

I write this post to attest to the payment of my dollar.  The requisitioning of my white chair.  My open eyes, my breath.

My Time

Is everyone at my stage of life this jealous of their time?  In a burst of irony, I spent 15 minutes yesterday penning an enraged screed in response to a Target returns department customer survey, railing against their policy of UPS drop off.  Really, Target, really?  You force me to take 25-30 minutes out of my day to print out a label, pack up my item, and drive to a UPS store and back, all to return an item you shipped to me damaged?  Your error, not mine?????

The fact that I can still summon an instantaneous, righteous blaze of anger about this speaks less to the petty injustices of late-stage capitalism and more to how scarce a resource time seems to me now, that any unwanted demand on it must be met with full-scale resistance.

I must now take a caesura to feed the baby.

***

I'm back.   I am only able to come back because I have taken today off.  If I had not taken today off, I would not have been able to start this post, let alone finish it, and I would have had to farm out feeding the baby.

I wonder if this is an American affliction.  Do people in other developed countries, which ascribe more cultural value to leisure, and less to work and motherhood, feel less vicious about their time?  

I know for certain it is a female problem, insofar as it is a burden that falls disproportionately on women.  When I look at my husband and all the things he doesn't have to deal with (most cleaning, most meal planning, all finances, taxes, any major life decision, any research regarding major and minor life decisions or medical conditions, all research and hiring regarding home repairs and household acquisitions, buying clothes and kid stuff, presents, birthdays, doctor's appointments, making sure we have toilet paper), I think that must be nice.  

I also wonder what I would do with more time if I had it.  I have some inkling, because the nature of part of my work is cyclical, so I have periods in which the onslaught of the demands on my time relaxes slightly, as well as periods in which the inundation is furious I just try to close my eyes and think of England.

But when I do have slightly more time, I definitely waste a good portion of it.  I putter.  I fuss.  I contemplate changing careers and meal planning and uprooting my life and cleaning the toilet.  I read back page articles on New York real estate and follow Internet rabbit holes to learn what kind of rabbit I am, or how to make my peace with cheese.

I'm also creative, in a way I'm unable to be when my life is stretched like a drum head over my allotted hours.  I might write, or plan workshops, or invite over a friend.  I might take a new route home, or go someplace I've never been.  But I simply have no space to make space most of the time.

Hence my rage against UPS drop off.  I want my time to be mine to waste.

I am sorry that it has come to this; I'm not sure how to fix it.

New Year's Eve

This time, as the year's last day scrapes up against its successor, I can't get past the word scrape, with its trail of blood and skin.

I have left both behind in 2018.  And a lot more: my last birth, the last time I'll hold another being so gingerly, a degree or two of mental acuity, waves of regret.

I'm starting to feel my life closing up on me, which is what makes the exercise of bidding farewell to one year and greeting another so doleful this time around.  I am reluctant to sum up my accomplishments,  because I am afraid they are dwindling.  I am reluctant to spell out my hopes, because I'm having trouble summoning them.

It has been alright, heretofore, to stagger from year to year under the weight of my responsibilities; now,  I'm beginning to think I've been frittering my life away, and that I will waste, similarly, the decade or two I have left compos mentis.

(Autocorrect insists upon "composure mantis," which I'm sure I'll become soon enough.)

The person I want to talk to about this is my father, and he is, for that purpose and many other purposes, gone.

2019: Maybe it's the year to ask for nothing, to demand nothing of myself or the world. To observe as I can, remember what I can, be as I have to be.

Dwindle

Never having been pretty, I am not finding my recession into the invisibility of middle age to be particularly troubling.  I have wrinkles- so what?  I've had other imperfections longer.  People look past me- so what?  They always did.

But my mind is also dimming, and I am struggling with this decline even more than I imagined I might.  Smarts have been the bedrock of who I am.  And I hadn't even realized the extent to which my intelligence gifted me with competence and confidence.  For years, I have believed that I could do almost anything I put my mind to- from working as a feature writer on zero experience, to penning a romance novel, to leading workshops.  I have believed I could do anything because, in large part, I could.

I have read that the brain changes of Alzheimer's begin in one's thirties.  I feel them.

When I was running meetings at the coop in my twenties, calling on individuals in the order in which they had raised their hands, I used to be able to track a mental roll of twenty or more names.  Now I'm lucky if I can remember three digits in a row.  I can't recall the name of that eighth reindeer (Google reveals that it's Comet), or whether or not my good friend discovered the sex of her baby in advance the first time around, or the name of the acquaintance who recently committed suicide.  I fish for words when I write, and when I go back to edit, I discover humiliation: missing articles, bungled verbs, iffy comparisons.

This Christmas, I mailed my in-laws' presents to myself.

In short, I can no longer be relied upon.  And I have always, always been able to rely on myself.

I accept this because I must, because there is no other option than acceptance.

But it is painful.  Who am I without my intelligence?  No one I particularly care for.  I suppose the challenge will lie in coming to do so.