I think gym classes in middle school and high school need to be more reality based. Instead of teaching proper technique for push ups, gym classes should teach kids how to survive real-life scenarios. Train a thirteen year old how to carry a bag of groceries and a squirming toddler in one hand while unlocking the front door with the other. Teach a tenth grader how to remove an air conditioner from a window while simultaneously avoiding toys on the bedroom floor. What’s the best form for changing a messy diaper (think last night’s dinner of pork chops and corn) and preventing the baby from rolling away? Forget running the mile in under ten minutes. How long does it take you to get jackets, socks, and shoes on three resistant children and then buckle said children into their five-point harness car seats?
These are the scenarios I wish gym class had trained me for. These are the scenarios that, as a newly single parent, fill me with the most trepidation. I will plan the events of a day based on how many times I have to buckle my kids in the car. I will limit our interactions with the outside world based on how many bags an outing requires us to take. I will time a day’s trip based on the likelihood of my kids falling asleep in the car, on whether or not I feel up to hoisting 42 pounds of dead weight into the house with one arm.
I guess the bottom line is that, a lot like gym class, nothing prepared me for this.
When Eric first got sick in April with the seizure and then the diagnosis, I knew we would buckle down and do whatever we had to do to see him through. I knew I would find fuel in the reserves to do whatever he needed. I remember lying on our bed one late night in May. He had started the radiation appointments and chemo at that point. He was tired and shaky all the time, moving slower, speaking less. I remember thinking so clearly to myself, This is impossible. How are we doing it?
Maybe because it all happened so quickly–the first seizure, the discovery of the primary tumor, even the brain surgery on Friday and home on Sunday!–there was no room to debate whether or not we could do it. We just had to do it. And it turns out I’m pretty handy in crisis mode. I can make insurance calls and organize medications like the best of them.
This, though. The three kids, the job, the house, the life without him…Nothing prepared me to do this without him. Even him sick in May and June, in the hospital in July, at my parents’ in August, when he could contribute little more than a steady presence. When I had to learn what it meant to be caretaker mother wife in fathomless dimensions. When he had to teach me how he made my coffee, so unfamiliar was I with the roles he filled before.
I thought I was learning everything I needed to know for now. But this?
Nothing prepared me for how cold the sheets would feel without his body warming the bed. Nothing prepared me for how bottomless his absence would feel, reaching corners of my existence I never even knew existed. Nothing prepared me for how hard it would be to muster up a single care for any other person besides my children, and even them at times.
Do you know screaming at the sky doesn’t bring him any closer? Punching the floor where my body has collapsed in grief, this does not bring him home. But then there are other moments where the life we had together for nine years doesn’t feel real either. I look at pictures of us and and think, I’d like to be friends with them, these strangers with kind smiles. There is a fog around my memories that say they are nothing more than dreams. I’m a guest in my own home, touching knick knacks and hovering over photographs like a visitor.
Nothing prepared me for this.
a scribble of jo 