April 2013
“I’m afraid,” my husband, Eric, says, lying next to me in our bed.
“I agree, I agree,” I reply.
We both laugh, recognizing the reference from When Things Fall Apart. Pema writes, “We are very rarely told to move closer, to just be there, to become familiar with fear. I once asked the Zen master Kobun Chino Roshi how he related with fear, and he said, ‘I agree. I agree.”
I reach over to Eric and squeeze his hand. He holds on, and we lie quietly together under the covers, listening to each others’ breath. (There’s a lot of being awake in bed in this story, so much so that you might expect some sex. I don’t wish to disappoint, but it’s not that kind of story.)
“I’m sorry,” Eric says. He’s just been forced to resign from a job that provided good wages and a level of health care coverage for our medically complex preschooler and kindergartener that’s almost unheard of in the United States today. Although the difficulties have been developing for a while and we knew it might come to this, we’re both in shock, now that this reality has arrived.
“You don’t have to be sorry. It just is what it is. Let’s just try to be with the rawness and vulnerability, and not fall into blame or anger. I’m noticing that I’m very, very glad you’re lying next to me. I’m so glad you’re here, and you’re alive. That’s the important thing.”
I know that, if I were more advanced in my spiritual practice, I might be able to be unattached even to whether my husband is alive or dead, but I’m not there yet. So what I hold onto in this moment is that, whatever else is going on, in this moment he and our children are all alive, and that is a very pleasant thing to be present to.
The truth is, I am a little angry with him. Ninety-five percent nonjudgmental and present, and five percent angry. Or maybe it’s ten percent.
But I’ve been practicing refraining – refraining from my habit of lashing out with anger and blame. So when he unexpectedly showed up at my office during the work day a few weeks ago to tell me that his boss was unhappy with him, and that he’d been warned that he needed to change, I’d hugged him, and said, “We’ll get through this. We’ll figure it out. We always do. I love you.”
I was a little angry — maybe fifteen percent — because Eric is sarcastic, and he teases people, and he’s gotten feedback about that for a long time — from me and others. And sometimes, although he always does what he needs to do, he has an I’ll-do-it-because-I-want-to-not-because-you-told-me-to attitude that probably infuriates his supervisors as much as it does me. It would have been easy, if I hadn’t been studying Pema and meditating for a decade, to repeat to myself a story line that would feed that anger and fuel it, and build myself up into a storm of righteous indignation and wrath.
But instead I noticed my story line, and breathed, and refrained from my habitual addictive behavior of anger and blame and saying “I told you so,” though it was tempting — so very tempting — to do that.
Refraining from that story seemed to give him space. He didn’t have to spend time defending himself from me so he could still feel loved. He had the space to be surprised, and shocked, and to think it over. And so I was just present with him, in our rawness and fear and vulnerability.
During the weeks that Eric changed his behavior at work to respond to his boss’s feedback, he was reading my old battered copy of When Things Fall Apart. I’d read and reread it during the years when we wanted children and didn’t get pregnant. “We call something good, we call it bad,” I’d read. “But really we just don’t know.”
Clearly that was crazy. I knew the pain I was feeling was bad, the emotional pain of not having children when all of our friends were falling pregnant with ease, and the mental pain of questioning all the life and career decisions that had caused us to delay trying to conceive until we were nearly thirty, and had left us with an income that made saving to adopt a daunting task.
But I’d kept coming back, drawn to her message even though I didn’t understand some parts and disagreed with others, underlining each re-reading with a new color of ink, turning down the corner of nearly every page. Then we did get pregnant, and the book migrated back to the bookshelf. I found it again when our newborn son spent months in the hospital, his fate uncertain. When Things Fall Apart stayed on my nightstand from then on, through our son’s survival and homecoming, his years of medical fragility at home, through the birth of another child who was ill in the hospital and at home, through neurosurgery for Eric and the complications and illness he experienced afterward.
Now, as we laid together in bed after the kids fell asleep, the lamp glowing warmly on the quilt my mom made us for our tenth anniversary, Eric laid the book on his chest. “I feel like she did when she went to Gampo Abbey. She thought she was a fundamentally likeable person, but she kept getting all this feedback about how her style was driving people crazy, and she couldn’t ignore that feedback. It’s like she says about looking in the mirror and seeing a gorilla, and no matter what you do, when you look you’re still a gorilla. At first I thought Tom and Dave were just making things up, that they were just saying this because I don’t laugh when they make fun of other people, or because they just want to hire their own people. But now I see I can’t ignore what they’re saying.”
He paused, and I reached my hand out from under the covers to hold his, letting the silence lie between us. He continued quietly, “I thought people thought I was funny. I like all of the people I work with. I would never want to hurt their feelings.”
I squeezed his hand. I don’t know how I would have reacted to getting similar feedback about fundamental parts of my character. I’m not sure I would have been able to hear it so well, or take it to heart. I felt lucky, so lucky to have for a partner this man who was willing to be so present, who had the courage to see so clearly.
Eric changed some of his behavior, but in the end it wasn’t enough — perhaps it had never been the real issue, but only a pretext — and he was given the choice to be fired or to resign. He resigned.
So here I am again, lying in this bed with my husband of fifteen years, filled with fear about money and shame at Eric’s role in what happened. Outside, a light rain falls. Occasionally a car swishes by on the wet pavement, one of our neighbors in this quiet midwestern city returning from shift work at Quaker or ADM.
No matter how often I fail, I’m always convinced that I can solve problems if only I think about them enough, most often in the middle of the night when I’d rather be sleeping. Sometimes the story I tell myself is that it is entirely Eric’s fault, and then I notice that my heart beats fast and my chest feels tight and hot and my face burns and I feel sick to my stomach at the idea of facing the neighbors or my family. I breathe. “Shame,” I note, “anger. We can’t be present in the moment and run our story lines at the same time. Just breathe.”
So I breathe, noticing that I’m snug under the covers, with Eric’s sleeping warmth next to me. (His response to stress is never to lie awake, but rather to fall immediately into deep sleep). I notice that I am filled with fear about the future, mentally calculating how to pay the bills on my salary. I notice that I am afraid, even though, in this moment, I and my family are fine.
I lie there, staring at the ceiling, at the pattern of lights that flow across the ceiling as cars drive by outside. The red minutes flash by on the clock on the nightstand. I notice that the story has started up again in my head, this time a story that fits Eric’s experience into the pattern of the other staff at his workplace who’ve been driven out or outsourced or replaced with lower-wage workers. Perhaps Eric made mistakes, but it probably didn’t matter; he always would have been replaced with someone who earned less. I notice that this story makes me feel calmer and more at peace. At some points in my life I would have fought to stay in the well-it-probably-wouldn’t-have-happened- no-matter-what-Eric-did story, because that story smooths the rough edges and helps me feel calm. But it’s also a story and not the present moment, so I go back to breathing in the sense of confusion and messy rawness. I try to remember that “[We] want to make it work out one way or another. [But] we don’t deserve resolution, we deserve something better than that . . . [we deserve] the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity . . . . To stay with that shakiness — to stay with a broken heart . . . . with the feeling of hopelessness . . . . that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic – this is the spiritual path.”
So I lie there breathing, simply being with the messiness and uncertainty of this thing that had upended our lives, pulled the rug out from under our feet.
I would like to tell you that I am able to stick with my uncertainty and breathe my way through the anger and the fear and on into sleep, but that isn’t true. I keep breathing and noticing that I am slipping into stories and feeling afraid, and my eyes feel drier and sandier and my stomach begins to hurt, and I notice that I have added worry about how tired I will be at work tomorrow to my long list of other worries. Over and over, I note that I am thinking and return my attention to my breath. After two hours I get up and take a Benadryl, which always brings in the tide of drowsiness so that I can dive, with relief, into the deep pool of sleep.
I would like to tell you how this story ends. But the point of the story is that I don’t know. None of us do. It’s better if you know just what I know now. That right now, we are alive (and I am still very attached to that as a good thing). I don’t know quite how we will pay our bills, and I don’t know how much we can pare back our already frugal lifestyle. In our affordable Midwestern town, rent would cost about as much as our mortgage. Even if we can get our kids on state health insurance, they might not thrive as well if it doesn’t cover the kinds of medical care and occupational therapy that helped them thrive under private insurance. Or maybe they won’t be eligible for state insurance, and we’ll end up paying a third of my salary out of pocket to pay for their insurance and health care, taking money out of our retirement fund to do so, and never being able to save for our kids to go to college, or retire ourselves.
I don’t know, so I can’t tell you. I’m staying here, right here in this messy moment. I’m giving up hope “that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be . . . At every turn we realize once again that it’s completely hopeless — we can’t get any ground under our feet.” But that’s okay, because I’m learning that “the only time we ever know what’s really going on is when the rug’s been pulled out and we can’t find anywhere to land.”
It’s a long week: a friend is fired for reasons outside her control. I find out that an acquaintance’s husband is fleeing his father’s death and his responsibilities to his wife and four children by having an affair. Eric’s grandmother is being moved to a nursing home.
On Friday night, we usually have take-out pizza and watch a movie, but this week, we’ll eat leftovers and watch an old favorite, Toy Story. We lie on the rug in front of the television together, couch cushions thrown on the floor for pillows, blankets pulled to our chins against the unseasonably cold spring evening. The boys lie on each side of me, cradling their heads against my shoulders. Eric, lying on the other side of our older son, touches his feet to mine under the blanket. I watch and doze, pleased to feel sleepy for once.
“You can’t fly,” Woody taunts, fearful of being displaced as Favorite Toy by the obtuse but lovable Buzz.
“Can,” Buzz says. He leaps from the edge of the bed, lands on a rubber ball and bounces up onto a plastic car racing track. He slides down, doing a loop-de-loop and landing in a perfect gymnastic plant.
“That’s not flying,” Woody sneers, “That’s falling with style.”
I laugh, delighted to hear my own situation summed up so precisely. The rug has been pulled out from under me again, and I’ve given up hope of being able to get ground under my feet, much less fly. I’m just trying to fall with style.