Raising Cain

Attitude is everything- and I try to have a good one. Remain open, manage my expectations. Reframe in the positive.

So there is this-

I love choral music, and I used to love to sing, and I haven’t really had that in my life since Trinidad; I have missed that deeply. But the thing I really loved about music I think, was making it with my friends. They were my tribe. And my time with them was so significant that I can still sing the Vivaldi Gloria from end to end, all these years later. I hum the Fauré Requiem in the car. I belt the Messiah in the shower. I know the words to the Austrian National Anthem. The first two verses anyway. I loved doing the opera Carmen and I can sing all the parts.

So my baby went to university and I though I could fill my chasm of a void with singing.

First off, my voice is rusty. And my sight reading is worse. Furthermore, Monday night rehearsals after the typically chaotic Mondays of my day job, followed by my second job, and the time spent with my homebound student, leave me drained at 7PM and not in the mood for anything, least of all singing music that I don’t naturally like (but I’m trying to like.)

Still, I kept showing up. I know what I need is practice and commitment. I’m no quitter. And also it is the fond wish of my youngest child that I persevere.

So I am persevering.

Tonight was my first concert with the new choir and it was went alright.

Our performance uniform is a black turtleneck, black pants, and black shoes with black stockings. And silver earrings.

The black ensemble seemed the antithesis of festive, so my silver earrings were huge and sparkling with rhinestones. And it was a performance, so as per my Michael Steele training, I wore make up.

Lots of make up.

Foundation and concealer and bronzer and highlighter and eyes and cheekbone sculpting and lip color.

Basically all of Sephora.

When I strode into the church hall, it was like Jezebel walking into the temple.

The ladies were there in their black orthopedic shoes and their freshly scrubbed faces and their tiny silver earrings and their close cropped grey hair. A couple of them definitely cast a withering gaze upon my ensemble, and if they were women who used such words, I know they would have been thinking “what the hell?” But it was probably something more like “what in tar nation?”

It was the equivalent of a screeching toucan descending into the middle of a flock of turtle doves.

I was going to leave right after the concert but talked myself into staying for a bit. So I was served a massive plate of unfamiliar food, because God forbid one should refuse anything – and it was all mostly delicious in a Cracker Barrel kind of way. I can’t even begin to calculate the carbs. Like a million grams.

This was their church Christmas dinner and the ladies were being so gracious. So I sat and I ate and I tried to join in the polite conversation, but mostly I listened because I didn’t have much to contribute. It was generally the ladies’ health problems (most of the ladies are very elderly) and the goings-on of people I don’t know. I tried to arrange my features into what I hoped was a pleasant expression while I confronted a mound of chicken and noodles that was served on another mound of mashed potatoes (I think this is how it’s eaten- everyone was served them that way) while trying not to make my table manners look too foreign and weird, but I was unsuccessful as I noticed the sidelong glances at my gentle wielding of my knife and fork in tandem.

I tried not to look … pretentious. But it’s just how I was taught to use utensils. Everyone on my island uses a knife and fork the same exact way. A leftover artifact of British colonialism.

Anyway, trying not to look like the bizarre foreigner got too exhausting, and after what I thought was a respectable amount of time, having conquered most of the noodles, and all of the pie, but none of the green dessert concoction I could not identify, I rose to depart. I had made it through the evening keeping my family honor intact, but then I rammed my exposed toes (I was wearing high heeled sandals – I couldn’t find my black pumps) into the wheel of someone’s walker that was positioned behind me and an expletive escaped. I won’t say which one, but any cuss word said in a church meeting room is inappropriate.

And the gathering bristled with the shock.

I drove back home from the depths of rural Hamilton county on unfamiliar, unlit, country roads in the pitch blackness of a late fall night in the American Midwest. And I shed a good few tears.

This empty nesting is not going well.

I was sad because of the realization that not only am I very far from home, I am without a tribe. I had made myself a small one, a small tribe, a tribelette, and all was well once we had each other. But now we mostly hold each other close in the heart and are seldom together.

I was sad because I realized with absolute certainty that if there is something that is going to fill my void, this choir is not it.

Right at this very moment, I am the loneliest person on the planet.

And yes I know how that sounds.

Pathétique.

So I try to reframe.

I am a healthy, lonely person.

I am a blessed, and fortunate, lonely person.

I am a lonely person with employment, with a big messy house, with four lovely sons, with many faithful friends, with a handyman who will paint my dining room blue on Tuesday.

I am a lonely person who needs to focus on gratitude, and to find a way to emerge intact from this unhappy chapter- while I work on becoming who I am going to be, now that I have to try to be something other than mostly just their mother.

I had really hoped that would always be enough.

How soon is too soon to get back to life after losing a friend? 

Ethan-Jonah and I both lost friends tragically  over the holidays and are walking around only partially engaging in life, and only perfunctorily engaging with each other and the rest of the crew that we are sequestered with. I want to be a good role model. And I’m probably failing. 

The thing about grief: it has no roadmap.

Even if we have experience with it, grief is dodgy enough that it is qualitatively different every time. And we are lost. 

I am thinking – I have lost friends before, but always far away friends, or friends from long ago. I felt sad. I wept. I looked through old pictures. 

But this friend – thanks to messaging apps, I spoke to a lot. Almost every day. We had a large group of very close friends in common. All in England. He was my lifeline to them, as not many of them are as good at keeping in touch as we are. 

We were. 

When we talked it was almost always about the boys first. He had an insatiable interest in how they were doing with school and work and love. And I have so many boys that there was almost always news. Then he would fill me in on the doings of the “Family” which is what we call the tight knit group of close friends who live in London. A group to which I am a peripheral member, because I don’t live in England. My visits to London are always all about the “Family” – we have known each other since childhood or at the very least, our teenage years. We were all singers and actors once. Some of us went pro and still perform. We have between us, a million memories of shared music and performance and shenanigans. And we have rituals that we repeat whenever we see each other, on my trips to London. At my rabid insistance, we always sing. Simone-Marie  and I always have dinner alone at least once. Nigel arranges parties and he and I have our customary wine fueled heart-to-heart talks until the wee hours. Stuart and I go to the theatre. CJ and I haunt museums and blues bars. Either alone or with boys in tow. Nigel always says, when I return home, “the family is getting some much needed rest now that you have gone.” 

Next time the rituals will be different. 

I can’t even begin to contemplate “next time.” 

And a voice in my head says there will not be a “next time.” 

What a selfish, self-involved , self-flagellating thought.

Of course there will be a “next time,” but we will be forever changed and nothing will be the same.

There was not much news to share recently as life came to a grinding halt with the shut down. But we still checked in. Almost every day. Even if it was two lines of text or a two minute call. 

With one exception- the last days of last month. The last days of his time here.

I was fully engaged in head-on Christmas preparation mode. The boys were headed home one by one and construction on the ground floor was still being completed the day before Christmas Eve. When the furniture was moved back in that day, there was a mad scramble to get the tree and presents back downstairs, throw up a few decorations, finish cleaning, baking, food prep, making sure the rooms and beds were ready for the boys, helping with their wrapping. It would be the first time we had been all together since March, and the last time before who knew when again. I no longer have aspirations for “perfect” – but it needed to be as special as my means and energy stores would allow, while keeping perspective and managing expectations. And it was. Perfectly imperfect. 

Meanwhile, in London, my friend was ill with Covid and I was completely unaware. 

I don’t think I will ever recover from the guilt of that. 

Every year, for years and years, we wished each other a happy Christmas on the day itself. He would throw legendary Christmas parties and would call me during, so I could speak to our friends. This year there was no party. And on Christmas Day he didn’t call because he was so ill. And I didn’t call, because my head was filled with Cornish hens and trifle and finding the napkin rings.

The day of the night he would die, I got his Christmas card. And I thought: I need to let him know it finally got here. This shutdown era mail is so slow. But my head immediately filled with making dinner because my household of six had become seven, with the arrival of Timothy’s girlfriend, and I missed the opportunity. 

And I am beyond sad. 

At this loss. At my failure to be there. At my inability to rewind time. At my inability to make things turn out any way other than the way they did. 

Adolescents have this thing they do. It’s a unique experience fallacy. 

Because they are by nature self-involved, coupled with inexperienced, and tripled with immature, they see themselves as experiencing a particularly unique journey, with little awareness that others have felt as they feel, and have done as they have done. They are barely aware either, of those on a different path, with wants and needs and loves and hurt of their own. It’s a developmental stage and they usually outgrow it to become people with a certain degree of compassion and empathy and honest introspection. 

At pivotal moments in my life though, I feel like I regress. 

I see the world only through my particular personal experience, with my vision skewed by sadness. 

And not just sadness either. Shortly after the birth of my first child, I had a surreal experience. I was at the mall with my mother and my baby, and i was struck, as I saw droves of people hurrying about, throngs of teenagers and happy families with children exhibiting different degrees of misbehavior, amid the noise and chaos of Castleton Mall at Christmastime, and had a sudden realization. A momentous thing had happened to me, personally. And not to the world. These masses of people neither knew nor cared that my life had been forever changed. That I had survived a precarious delivery and was now a mother to this perfect human. But I did see another new mother, with a young baby in a stroller, also in The Limited, also probably looking for leggings and tunics to accommodate post-pregnancy corpulence . We looked at each other, this girl and I, for one beat longer than is socially acceptable. We didn’t smile. Maybe she was coming to the realization too, that this brazen world had carried on in indifference, while unspeakable things had been done to her body as she made a human and changed life as she knew it, forever.

And so it is, for me, in grief.

The sun, when it manages to shine in Indiana winter, does so much too extravagantly bright for my liking. What birds remain after the smart ones fly south, sing too loudly, and mock me with their song. Life goes on too much and too fast. It refuses to slow down. It refuses to wait for me to catch up. In the three weeks since he left, the world changed, and he wasn’t here to see it. 

The lesson then, and I suppose there must always be a damned lesson, is that grief is a lonely traveller. But while life continues when we hop off the treadmill to follow that path for a bit, our place is marked, and waiting for us to slide back into our spot, and rejoin the race when ready. And in the mean time, the obnoxious birds will keep calling outside our window, and the equally obnoxious sun will continue to shine too brightly, reminding us that the world anticipates we will be joining it again, soon enough. 

Because that is the way of it.

We grieve, and then, inevitably, we go on.

Even if we are limping. 

Even if our heart is bruised.

I miss my friend. 

Welcome to Raising Cain.
This started as a series of musings on motherhood and grew to set of twenty, and counting, essays on parenting and life.

I am a mother of four sons, living and working as an educator, and previously as a therapist, in Indiana. I am originally from Trinidad where I was born and raised, and lived several years in Miami before relocating to the Midwest with my family.

I am still suffering from culture shock all these years later, especially when it starts snowing.

I hope you will find that some of what I write will resonate with you, parent or not, as we continue on this journey.

I hope to be a published, in print writer someday, and it all starts here! Thanks for visiting!

Simone