Struggling through with joy... |
kind of.
Struggling through with joy... |
Recently at bedtime my husband sang, “There were five in the bed and the little one said: Roll over, roll over,” and my son lifted his eyes from the book he was reading and grinned. T hopped up with excitement and started singing along, quietly. Now that he is seven and officially a reader, he often ignores this part of the bedtime routine altogether to bury his head in one or another of the library books that litter the living room.
When he was a baby, T loved this song. I sang it to him every naptime and every bedtime. I held him and sang it when we had a hard night, because it was one of the few songs I could sing in-key almost all the way through. The song was often a surefire way to comfort and quiet him. I sang it until I was hoarse on a long trip home after my uncle’s funeral. Because I was the youngest and ostensibly had the best eyes, I was the primary driver on that trip. My aunt, uncle and mom took turns sitting next to T and playing with him as we drove over the continental divide, through the ski towns of Colorado. Our trip to my uncle’s funeral was all the winter beauty we take for granted, filled with vast blue skies, the bright white snow of the mountains a sharp contrast to the evergreens. The trip back was what we’ve come to expect living in Colorado: a winter storm moving out ahead of us, the roads icy and snow-packed, and no choice but to move forward. I needed to get back to work, and everyone just wanted to be home. The trip stretched from five hours to seven, and we were driving in the dark with a tired, cranky toddler and four exhausted adults. As we finally descended from the mountains and through the canyon that leads to our town, T had had enough. It was dark and he’d been in his carseat far too long. He was sick of not being able to move and having his schedule upended for days. He cried and cried, and I sat behind the steering wheel, sweating, unable to do anything. We were still at least 45 minutes away from home. “There were five in the bed and the little one said: Roll over, roll over…” I started. He grumped a little but started to quiet as my mom stroked his little chest. The outlines of the mountains around us faded as I sang and sang. I looked in the rearview mirror and my mom nodded to encourage me to keep singing, so I did. My uncle dozed in the seat next to me. I had driven these roads so often in my adult life I could nearly do it in my sleep. I lived on the opposite side of the state for 20 years, only moving home after my father died and I married. When I got the call that my father was gravely ill, I drove through this canyon alone in my ridiculous sports car. It was silent as a tomb. I couldn’t bear listening to any music and there was no one to sing to, no one to comfort. Just me, driving toward a whole new life I was ill-prepared to live, letting go of my father and finally becoming, at 36, a real adult. His death marked the beginning of a slow, new phase of letting go: a few years after he died, his sister's husband passed, and then my mom’s brother. This is a blessedly slow phase. My mother is a daily part of our lives, and although I haven’t seen my aunt and uncle much because of the pandemic, they are near, providing love and encouragement and occasional presents from afar. They are with me, in this new life: motherhood, middle age, marriage. The surest thing I know is that life is never all one thing: it is never just grief and no joy; it is never just burden with no relief. I’ve felt at times that it is, that I can barely pick myself up and go on, but distance gives me a fuller picture. The blessing of the nurse who held my mother and cried with her the day my father died; the man who reached out to me in my grief, let me cry and rage and stare out the window for hours at a time, and married me; the prayed-for son fussing in the back seat next to his doting grandmother and great-aunt. His spitfire little sister who reveals my impatience and capacity for joy. The calm that comes with the aches and discomforts of middle age. The remembrance of a song that carried us through to home.
2 Comments
3/6/2021 08:02:32 pm
Your writing is beautiful. The details of the setting brought me along that ride with you. I am sorry for your loss.
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