Some Tears for the Ocean

I've never cried so hard as that September day in 2007 when James drove his moving truck down our street. He was moving away from Salt Lake to live with his office assistant, Sarah, and her young son in Virginia, after a divorce that I didn’t initiate or want, the whole process carrying an urgency for him I was too stunned and scared to disagree with; April 2007, he wanted out, quickly, for reasons I didn’t yet know, sweetening the request with a sales pitch that he’d live close—right down the street—see our girls as much as ever, and watch them so I could attend night school at Westminster. On the last day of school—3rd for Julia, Kinder for Livy—in June 2007, everything had been sent to the judge, and we told the girls the news, calling them in from playing to sit them down on our bed that very afternoon, reassuring that very little in their lives would change.

He reassured them that very little would change then hugs, kisses, back outside to play on the first day of summer break.

And perhaps the start of a new life requires empty promises to the old one; haste, stealth, carefully-placed anger effortlessly-brilliant as a no-fuss getaway from wife, kids, dog, creating a whirlwind that in July, after a judge had stamped our decree (and the settlement is hard to change), had quieted and I could finally hear the money James had been sending Sarah and how right I’d been over all these years to suspect their texting wasn't "just friends.” In July when he told me he’d be moving to Virginia, the girls were again playing outside, running around with the neighborhood kids, that night all of us attending a big Harry Potter launch party down the street at The King’s English while I was emotionally still standing in my kitchen as I had earlier that day throwing coffee on James and shivering. Shivering because none of what I’d solidified inside me as comfort had been true; he’d move in September, and the ruse was an unbearable coldness that he only acknowledged by getting disgusted at me for tossing coffee on him.

And on that September day he moved, James’ dad was here from Virginia, attempting—as we both were—to right the error of James moving. I said right there in front of Bob, “James, don’t move out there to her and come visit your girls; stay here and go visit her.” I was going back to school and needed him here but more importantly so did the girls. They needed their dad to reassure them they were loved; needed this life-shattering sudden divorce to be as good as it could be, a new almost-as-safe existence where adults model emotional maturity. But James wasn’t listening, didn’t want to; and Bob and I were talking to him as if reasoning with a sinking ship.

And on that very day, Livy lost her first tooth in a bowl of popcorn. It landed in the large steel bowl then sunk to the bottom and Grandpa Bob and the girls and I searched for it but hanging out down there like a groupie with the whitish crumbs of popcorn, we could barely tell the difference between food and tooth. But then we finally did find it, and celebrating the victory became one of those moments that stands even now like finding a lost treasure. Like one of those stop-action moments, where everyone will remember where they were standing and how the sun glided in just so through the two windows that flanked the heavy, southern-facing front door.

And when he and Grandpa drove off in James’ UHaul, I wasn’t ready.

I didn’t want to see what was about to happen. Wanted to cover my eyes like in a scary movie, so that my brain didn’t invite in through my eyes what I didn’t want to become part of me.

Both girls chased the truck down the street. Down Garfield Avenue, where they’d grown up. Where we’d gotten our first puppy. Where Livy’d come Home from the hospital, where they’d played with the neighbor kids, and started school. Where they’d donned costumes in the cold of Utah Autumn to go get the big candy bars from Chuck and Dave’s house next door; where they’d bathed in the safety of familial surety.

And James noticed them running, and slowed his truck and pulled over at the end of our street—next to the orange house he’d eventually move into after the break up with Sarah—and got out of the driver’s side to walk around the back of the truck to where Julia and Livy waited on the sidewalk.

And as I was watching this play out from the slight distance it was as if I was looking outside of myself and my children. Like I was witnessing a moment near the end of a movie, where written into the story is a single epiphanic scene that makes everything pivot. To where inside James something about his tender dad looking for Livys tooth in a steel bowl of white specks had shifted him to the core of his being and he “UNDERSTANDS” to where when he gets out of the truck to hug his girls he decides he doesn’t want to ever stop doing so. I’m watching this scene of my own family from my own porch, knowing that the arc of this story would then be to forgive him this fucking shitshow if only he would hug his daughters and not get back in that truck and drive off. He’d walk back to where I am and tell me he’s not moving, he can’t do that to them, he’ll live here, and fly back and forth to see Sarah. I saw it all in a flash of “please, god. Please, God.”

But he didn't. He hugged them both quickly then walked back around the truck, got in and drove off.

And that night I cried with the force of a heartbreak I can’t describe, my body unable to hold back the ocean, I lived the sense of rejection my girls would feel, and the way they’d blame themselves. As if I could feel my 9 and 6 year old babies archetypal pain and the shattered revelation that dad doesn’t love them. Knew that my pain and his coldness would have to be repurposed as “daddy is just making a mistake; that’s what people do” or they would internalize the slight with misplaced blame; knew that in doing so, I’d open their hearts to a simultaneously potential idolization of Sarah—younger, thinner; flashy, uncomplicated, the unburdened “winner” as I sat through horrible days of facing what that made me in all this.

I Could feel that I’d have to let my young, vulnerable babies integrate into the lives of people who didn’t care about hurting them. And I was living inside the normalization of cruelty I didn’t want to exist yet which I was now tasked with helping them recover from.

And rolling myself into the fetal position on my bed that night, I convulsed from the grief of all I’d seen and would be seeing, and tore from my body the hurt that my most beloved connection to both this earth and my own soul might never be whole again. And that maybe neither would I.

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[The other day, the six year old girl who lost her tooth the day her dad left sent me the writings attached to this post. A heart-centered, emotional child from the very first day I held her, there have been many moments in her 20 years when I did not think it would be possible for her to remain on this planet.

The sudden revocation of emotional safety after James moved made both girls insane with anxiety—petrified that I’d somehow vanish into thin air—until at one point Livy, then 6, wasn’t able to go to school without sobbing for me until she was gagging.

So I started sitting outside her classes to help her ease into stability and she was starting to feel more confident until, one random day, her first grade class were playing a game for P.E. when suddenly Livy broke off from the group, ran over to me—falling into my arms—and in the broken gasps of uncontrollable feelings, barely got out through her hyperventilating, “I (sob)…miss…my (sob)…daddy.” And in the seconds after, her little body convulsed with all the grief I’d lived to protect her from and somehow became embedded in my own, as if forcing me to learn about pain in a way I couldn’t ever understand otherwise.

And some moments stay with you forever. Are designed to. For at that time, on that day, in that gym, patting my baby’s back, telling her “I know you do baby. I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry”—my own heart broken—I would have done anything to deliver her from that pain. Because I know the doubts that creep in to hurt us when the lights are out and my heart that day met her inside all those nights. Into The Great Loss, where we become bound to an event simply because our hearts are too injured to allow expectance of anything better. Into the experiences which don’t leave, even when you ask them nicely, and are a good and “perfect” little girl. When fear shines like a search light, Discovering all the little pockets of emptiness, all the wounds, and tells that story over and over of having to run to mama because there’s too much pain. And we can’t do this.

Yet There are secrets to life that only years tell the truth of. And Livy now writes with a wise voice that is both herself and her heartache. She writes with a voice that is both the ethereal connections via empathy with all humankind and also the razors-edge days when she wanted to die.

For Placed inside a heart, grief and uncertainty get to meet up with their better selves, together casting long shadows over moments on porches chasing trucks down streets until all events reverberate with the light received from one another. Making tears the rise and fall of opportunity, and standing on our porch looking down the street the chance we needed to see that the grief consuming us is actually Love patiently waiting for that very day to start speaking].

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At the theater watching “Mamma Mia, Here we Go Again” again, Livy reached over the seat in a poignant part of the movie to grab my hand. In the dark I looked to her and her mouth moved in words of gratitude, telling me that, as a mother, I’d always been there for her. As the screen splashed fiction, we sat there and held hands, sharing our real story, and her eyes were misty and so were mine.

And of course I never wanted that 2007 day James moved to happen; for many years, I felt stuck with memories and reverberations of that day to where I even begged God to make the pain go away. For the foes are real: How can I bring up my girls to be caring and whole in a world where even I’m normalizing cruelty? In a world in which the immediate slice of rejection is their family? Events scar us and we never feel healed; and pass on as unlovable and ever the unsung hero of a story where tender, empathic folks are always the loser. Where the burden has become ourselves amid the weighty experiences of coexisting with a world of narcissistic vacancies.

But waiting on the porch with me that day was the child holding my hand in the theater. That same child who lost her tooth is quieting the whirlwind to make a path for realizations and resolutions, not wasting her own time denying her authentic and compassionate self and the consistent nurturance she has for this world. Ten years ago, she sobbed and gasped for relief of her pain on the floor of her elementary school gym then sits next to me in a theater, whole, intact, honest, and emotionally available.

On that porch and every day since was the wisdom of a universe we continually have yet to meet.

A universe revealing that love won’t always look like a dad doing the right thing; sometimes love will look like a grandpa looking for a lost tooth or two sisters running after a truck together. Love will look like a mom hopelessly sobbing in the fetal position and—as years pass—like an older sister letting her sleepless, anxious younger one sleep in her bed, and like that same younger sister writing words that make their mom weep. Inside the same eyes filled with the shadows of heartbreak, doubt, abandonment and running to mama, lives “help me” and someone rubbing our back until the colors of this existence are shades of rainbows and fall leaves, our tears baptizing us into a better version of ourselves.

For from even the shine of a movie screen in a dark room, pain and heartbreak can illuminate the story of deep love and empathy. The story where Livy and I hold hands in the potency of misty-eyed remembrance then, after, normal life continues, and as we drive home, we hum the same ABBA song in the breath of a summers night, revealing a long ago day on the front porch of a sinking ship to be merely one arc in a greater story about the ocean.