I Miss You When I Blink: Essays(43)

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So let me tell you: I approve of the organic lip balm in the eco-friendly tube that you used this morning because it’s good for your skin and also good for the planet. I saw that you waited at the four-way stop until it was your turn. I noticed that you RSVP’d to the invitations in your inbox promptly. Good work. You nailed it—all of it.



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I know how much you need to hear this.

I can never hear it enough.





Stuck in Traffic


I sat in hours of gridlock every day, because although we chose to live in the middle of the city, the things we all needed to do—get the child’s allergy shots, pick up Girl Scout cookies, fetch the special medicine for the old dog—were flung all over the metropolitan sprawl. I look back on these as “the driving years,” and not just because everything and everyone was driving me crazy. To get one child to volleyball practice and another to lacrosse required an entire afternoon and evening spent in stop-and-go traffic, one kid always doing homework in the front seat while the other was on a field chasing a ball. The joke in Atlanta was that it took everyone a half hour to get to the end of their own street, but the truth was that most of the time it took twice that long to get anywhere.

I lived in my car, snacks and water stashed in the glove compartment because many days I spent so long sitting and breathing exhaust and staring at other cars’ license plates—the automotive equivalent of looking straight at the butt of the horse in front of you—that hours would pass since I had last eaten or before I could give a hungry child a real meal. Watching a light turn from green to yellow to red to green to yellow to red while I inched imperceptibly forward just to get to the ramp onto the highway to start on my way to where I was going made me seethe with impatience. I growled curse words at the other drivers even when they weren’t doing anything wrong, just because they were there. This happened for some portion of every day.

At home, when everyone was at school and I was not in my car, I got some sense of accomplishment from my work. I would take my coffee down to my office and open up a document to edit for a client, but although I loved the cleanliness and quiet of it, I felt cut off from the world, alone. The window looked out onto a gutter puking rotted leaves into the driveway. I had furnished my office with a “guest seat” in hopes that people might drop by in the mornings or pop in after the kids were down in the evenings for a glass of wine and a little conversation.

Coffee? I texted friends.

Can’t today—soon! they texted back.

My friends were busy with their families, their commitments, their lives, and their driving. No one ever came and sat in the guest seat.

Life happens in phases, and even friends your own age aren’t always in the same phase you are. With my babies now grown into big kids, I was ready to make more time in my life for non-child-related things. But lots of my friends were still having babies. Many were knee-deep in a phase of life that had the least possible time for other adults. But I felt like I was ready for my friends again, and my friends weren’t ready for me. They couldn’t linger over coffee in my office. They were still lingering over milk bottles.

I missed the sense of community I had back when I worked in an office with other people, so sometimes I crammed my laptop into my purse and drove to one of the hip coffee shops one mile (thirty minutes) away, where it always appeared through the big glass windows as if everyone was engaged in conversation, gesturing wildly and drawing things in notebooks. But my stupid giant SUV was such a tight fit in the Fiat-size parking slots that most of the time I got too nervous about hitting something and circled the block until I ran out of energy and went home.

I started sitting at my kitchen island during the day, scrolling through Twitter, staring out the window, avoiding going downstairs to get to work. I let deadlines slide while I sat around thinking up metaphors for what I felt like. Here’s one: My daily existence felt like a skin mask—the kind that comes in a jar and smells like flowers and sugar when you smooth it across your cheeks and forehead and chin, creamy and slick at first. Then it dries, and as it shrinks up, it tightens and sucks the moisture right out of your pores. It cracks and puckers around your eyelids so you can’t blink, and the only thing you can think about is that you must get it off right now, you must catch one flaky edge with your fingernail and peel it off—rip it off!—so that your skin can breathe again in the moist, warm air.

Here’s another: Imagine you had a sweater in your size, in the exact color you liked, in the cotton blend that slides softly over your arms as you pull it on each morning. And you wore this sweater every day, and it was the very best sweater, and then one day, something happened—you don’t know what, because you don’t recall putting it in the dryer or washing it in hot water—but now it is just enough too tight that the fabric bunches up around your rib cage, the seams itch, and you can’t lift your arms over your head. You wonder if you’ve somehow put it on backward, so you try to take it off and put it back on the right way, but you just get stuck in it more, and now your elbows are pinned to your face and there’s a sleeve over your mouth, and you’re in a full, smothered panic.

That’s what I felt like, but worse, and all the time. Something had fallen out of place in my head. Sometimes I had heart palpitations so violent I could see my chest flutter through my shirt, brought on by nothing at all. And when I didn’t feel that anxiety, I didn’t feel much of anything. I often thought, Shit, what right do I have to feel this way? It’s so stupid. I told myself to get over it, because people were depending on me. So I decided to keep going and doing the things I signed up to do, because it’s wasteful and self-indulgent to feel bad when so much is really quite good. It’s ungrateful, and I was not going to be ungrateful.