Wishbone

Autumn has broken through New England. Although you’d hardly know it the way October has held some summer heat and the trees still are slow to turn to golds and deep reds. The cold just started to creep in and hold onto the daylight hours.

My late blooming garden takes it as a blessing. I wasn’t created with that natural knack for making things flourish and grow, so I have to find pride in the fact that my garden grew at all. I can’t say that seeing my friends with large squash and pumpkins and plump tomatoes doesn’t give me a sting of envy– it does.

Envy isn’t a thing I feel often, but it is a thing I have a hard time putting down. I don’t have much grace with it internally. It takes me a while to pull out its barbs.

It’s funny where this emotion wraps me up. I used to have envy with weddings. Wedding dresses used to gut me. I had eloped secretly with Ex in Las Vegas with the promise that we would have a wedding later. I had thought I was envious of all the wedding planning and wedding days, but time brings clarity: I was envious of not having secrets, the transparency, and of partners who could collaboratively make all the many decisions of a wedding. The funny thing is I don’t think weddings are my thing: twice I’ve taken vows and twice it was essentially myself, my partner, and the officiant. Neither time involved a white dress. Envy doesn’t live there anymore.

Sometimes I feel like motherhood is a place we get that tug of envy. You have thoughts that drip with shame and guilt wishing you were different for your family. You think, “Why can’t I be like so-and-so who puts dinner on the table every night for her family,” as you pour milk into cereal bowls. Or, “I don’t understand why it is so hard for me to get kids to school on time,” as you watch all the parents leaving drop off in droves while you’re just making your way to the school. Or when you misplace the leotard you had in your hands moments ago on recital day, but have now have lost in your own home despite frantic and thorough searching.

It’s a wishbone. That very human piece that has us reaching for things that aren’t ours. It is that cloud of bitter, sad, stinging grief where you wish yourself better, but haven’t been able to reach those stars yet. Despite how hard you’ve tried.

It drives us to keep reaching and gnawing at those itches envy creates until one of two things happen: we work towards a goal until it is no longer out of reach or we learn to let it float away for someone else to catch. The balance of it is tricky– knowing what to do with the things your envious of and then having the strength to give grace whichever way it falls.

Right now, I’m envious of parents who homes aren’t filled with invisible pathogens. Of mothers who’s very breath isn’t spreading deadly things through though home as they do the motherly things. I’m without grace about it. I am feelings. I am dread and disappointment and stress and a little defeat.

Yet, at the same time, I am twisted around both sides of the coin right now. Here I am being both. Feeling gratitude Match can work by staying out of the house and his employer will pay for that to keep him at his job site as they are impossibly busy and he is our only income. Yet, still feeling fucking mad at the world that I am the only one bailing out the sinking ship here. Two unvaccinated kids and a breakthrough case of Covid. The ships sinking, right?

So as I’m not sure what to do with my envy, which has me wrapped in knots, I do things in spite of it. I do small things with love and devotion– and try my best to have my fuse be a little longer than it feels. And I do them over and over and over again.

I wash the dishes. I butter the toast. I play fetch with the dog who is also in her feelings this week. I wipe and re-wipe walls and counters. I wash countless laundry. I make snuggles brief and hope they don’t notice how I won’t linger. I tackle projects that will be waiting for me when we are done with these pages of this chapter. I help with math homework. We watch movies. Fill the water bowl. Sip the coffee.

And then, even though I feel a little rubbed raw and sharp, rather than soft and grateful, I count blessings:

I’m still grateful for the moment when I went to inhale the warm scent of coffee, but came up with nothing, and was like, “Well, shit.” That it let me know not to bring it places to others… because I would not have known… and it would have followed me to places harming others.

Vaccines. I am on-my-knees grateful for vaccines. That I don’t have the brunt of it. A short lived 5PM headache and– which I think is from walking around in knots all day more than a virus– is wrong so far. The occassional nighttime cough.

We are lucky Match could leave and work and test. That he didn’t have miss out being a Dad to the one who just turned 13. She only gets him part time and thirteen, whether they want to acknowledge it or not, is big. I’m grateful we can go without so she could have him.

For the way school can come home for a little while. It is not the same, but we know how to make it a bridge.

We focus on the actual and I hope I drown the envy with time and space and patience and actions. Because a wishbone with its phantom ache is not where my heart should make camp. It’s work in progress, but this too shall pass. In the meantime, small things with great love over and over and over again until the the world feels softer than today.