Don’t Rock the Boat
I’m tired. Can I just name that? The wonky sleep of advancing years. Trying to hang onto joy in these times that shatter my heart, over and over. (I wish I could say everything seems worse in the middle of the night, but in this case it’s bad and badder all the time.) Fretting about the need to clean out the house, but doing little about it, while the literal and metaphorical clocks tick.
Abigail Thomas, who is eighty-five, wrote in a recent post: “Sometimes you wake up at four-thirty in the morning with a surge of energy and no cows to milk.” Gawd, I wish my waking hour were four-thirty; but no, it’s one-thirty. What do you do with one-thirty? Slip another melatonin tablet under the tongue and hope for a couple more hours? I have “cows,” I’m editing a memoir—and cleaning out the house. But not at one-thirty.
My internet was down for a week and a half this month. Well, down during “peak time,” which seemed to be from seven a.m. until sometime after I went to bed. Which partnered well with sleeplessness, what with getting up at four o’clock—unless I had finally gone back to sleep about then—and trying to think of everything I needed that day from the information highway before it went out again.
On the one hand, I often blame the internet for, well, everything happening globally. At the same time, I am personally dependent on it for so much. I find it tedious, and sometimes impossible, to conduct life on my phone. I kept thinking it was temporary, though there was no report of a widespread outage. Surely it wasn’t a problem with my equipment or my line, since it worked sometimes. Reddit suggested my “node” was oversold.
All to say, I didn’t contact customer support.
I have a lifelong reticence to rocking boats. Big boats, such as relationship obstacles; small boats such as anything involving talking on the phone. Hoping all of it will magically resolve in silence. I would rather live with stuff than risk shame or embarrassment or a negative reaction. I would rather cheer for miraculous, or have a root canal, than stir things up. I’m a nine on the Enneagram: the peacemaker—or the peacekeeper.
I learned from the cradle.
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My sisters and I are trying to clean out our family home. (Reminder: my father died in 1995, my mother eight years ago. And here we still are.) One afternoon a month—well, not really, but that was the goal—we gather to go through a box or two. This month it was a legal-size banker’s box chock full of my mother’s calendars, greeting cards, journals, copies of letters, and unmailed letters. Oh, the unsent letters. Processing her angst about her adult children over and over for years.
Her journal entries were written in spiral notebooks, or on single sheets. (She didn’t use the journals 
we gave her because “they were too pretty to write sadness in.”) The unmailed letters poured out in stationery pads or on onionskin paper; in her beautiful penmanship and in shorthand. Paper was filled day-after-day, month-after-month for years, trying to work out her feelings over how my younger sister and I (first serially, then in tandem) had blown up our lives, wondering what she had done wrong.
She never risked breaching our already distant—physical and emotional—relationship to talk about it; bottling it up inside instead. Had she, I would not have wanted to engage. Given our dearth of experience, I have no doubt we would have ended up more estranged. Which is not to say I didn’t know how she felt.
It took us four hours, even skimming. Some would argue to just throw it out without looking at it. They would not be wrong, but we can’t do that. Our parents are gone, this is the last opportunity to touch them. On June 21, the day my father unexpectedly died—the day after my forty-third birthday—our mother wrote two lines in her 1995 Sierra Club calendar: “Oh, George. I will miss you—suddenly the world seems so empty.” Our father’s full calendar suddenly stopped. It broke our collective heart.
My sister and I believe that our presence with our mother during the last years of her life healed all wounds. Though it was hard to read her toxic writings, mostly we grieved that she let anguish control her living for so long. She blamed her “bad parenting” for our actions, rather than see that we were capable women making our unique way through the world, owning our mistakes and cheering our successes. We were not clones. She and I measured successful parenting on different scales.
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I finally called CenturyLink. They sent a technician three days later. He reprogrammed the box on the wall outside the house, behind the espaliered forsythia—which I didn’t know was there—and said it wasn’t running at the speed I was paying for. It’s great now, even working faster than it ever has. I called and asked for a credit on my bill during the time it was out (so brave), but only got it for the time since I placed the call. Company policy. I should have rocked that canoe sooner, not waited until I knew it wasn’t going to return to shore on its own.
We plan to burn the letters, releasing us all. Especially our mother.
Every day is Mother’s Day. Blessings on you and yours.
I would love to hear from you! Are you a rocker or a steady sailor? Do you have a story? Leave a comment below.
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