Joyful, Anyway

1

Joyful, Except on Tuesdays

The alarm starts blaring and I’m up. I’m up now.

Through the grainy dark, across the bedroom, I see the door crack open and stop abruptly. Then a figure turns sideways and slips through. For months I have been trying to give away a blanket that looks like a lightly toasted burrito, which undermines my living room’s attempts to be sufficiently mid-century modern. But, rather mysteriously, the blanket continues to disappear from the Give-Away Box and here it is, floating like a phantom through the dark until it pauses by my bed.

The burrito wedges himself under the duvet and sighs.

“What did you dream about, Mom?” hisses my son Zach, because he can’t possibly whisper.

“I dreamed I was being pulled behind an enormous boat and I couldn’t let go,” I tell him, and glance toward the bedside table. My phone is blinking with a reminder about the “no lateness” policy at my pilates class as tardiness disturbs the vibrational atmosphere. And below that is a WhatsApp message letting me know that while I was sleeping there was a flurry of classroom moms who needed someone—but who?—to bring gluten free cookies for the fundraiser. I read both a few times over to make sure I am not still in the fugue state of sleep medication. Ever since chronic pain and cancer made their sudden appearance way back when, I don’t so much fall asleep as need to be put to sleep like a tranqued bear. I put my head back under the sheets.

Lately the number of small obligations and small heartaches—the sheer volume of them—makes me feel like I can’t breathe. Like every thought about what I should do races from my head to my heart to my lungs. Then every thought about what I can’t do constricts my chest for a moment. Every time I allow myself to fully consider the direction my life is taking, I feel a little shock wave running through me. But soon I’ll get up, make breakfast, and take a lot of fish-oil vitamins with the chilling guarantee of “minimal burp-backs” and that will allow me to limit a normal intake of self-esteem for the day.

“Don’t worry about the dream,” says the boy, burrowing deeper into his tortilla wrapping. “It’s like cupping water in my hands in the bath. It slips away.” He says it exactly like that, those precise words, like a seasoned meditation instructor. Then he adds: “Also I have learned that grenades are very simple devices. Is there a place where children can practice using grenades?”

He has been enthusiastically ignoring our family’s commitment to pacifism for some time now.

I hear the sound of the coffee grinder downstairs and feel a wave of gratitude for this off-ramp. My son feels my attention shifting and wraps his arms tighter around me.

“Please consider today if we can buy a zeppelin,” he says, and I resolve to have another word with my father about whether he can lay off military history in his nightly Zoom chats with his grandson. How about cultivating an appreciation for nature? I will say, and my dad will invariably reply that air-conditioning is God’s promise that we never need to go outside again.

By the time I have put on my jeans and a blazer, waterproof mascara, grabbed my gym bag, and made some hurried but uninterpretable sounds of thanks to my husband for the coffee, I’m out the door.

Good habits are the foundation of everything, so I start the weekday morning like every other. I sit down at my desk with a hot cup of hazelnut creamer and a splash of coffee, a heating pad for my old-man back, and a feverish delusion that I will claw my way out of the overflowing garbage heap that is my inbox and list of tasks.

Never mind. I’ll do it later. Errands are never errands. Errands are the referendum on whether I have enough of my nervous system left over to restart a fight with Linda from HR about a billing error. Sometimes I get the distinct impression that my feelings are not actually my own. I have been plugged—Matrix-style—into the parasympathetic circuitry of the universe.

I run through today’s litany of activities: praying for the Best Friend’s dumb relationship, waiting on my mammogram result for a suspicious lump, worrying about someone who is irritated with me (I think, not sure), and calling my mom to ask about her gum graft surgery while pretending that I am also recovering from my own gum graft surgery to see if I can make her feel sorry for me. But that’s just for fun. And of course there’s my actual job: grading, research, faculty meetings, interviewing for my podcast, and writing, writing, writing.

After an hour or so, the mania has subsided. Digging into some historical research gives me the strange synchronized calm of a woman in motion. I have always been quieted by work, squeezed into the wonderful necessity of what is in front of me. At the very least, it feels necessary, and that feeling turns down the volume on the deafening needs of everyone around me. Marriage made me a wife, my son made me a mother, and cancer made me a feminist. Had I not been diagnosed, I never would have turned up the sound of my own screaming desires. Not that anyone else heard them scream. I think, in the end, I mostly sounded like I was politely clearing my throat.

It has been ten years since that diagnosis, which is a shocking gift. And now that I am technically cancer free, I am left with the health problems of a very optimistic septuagenarian. I lecture strangers about colonoscopies. I have mysterious ailments and random lumps that make people start sentences with “Well, at least . . .” And like every retiree, I accept ongoing and future pain as an unwanted assignment.

Sometimes suffering will make you better, so much better than you wanted to be. It has the wonderful advantage of sloughing off some of the soft rot in the human heart. Like ignorance. That is probably the first thing to go. Slice, slice. Then arrogance. Cut, cut. This is the forced humility of experience. It’s hard to feel better than other people when you are certain that you are made up of sadness and deli meat.

Because suffering is mostly a knife, cutting away parts of you that, all things considered, you would prefer to keep thankyouverymuch, and when it ends—when you survey what’s left—people will expect you to be filling your gratitude journal, while you feel like a coroner.

Hard to say it better than Job. We are “born unto trouble, as the sparks fly upward.”

People who have suffered greatly—suffered unimaginably—will say that you never set your burdens down exactly. You learn how to carry them as you shoulder all the other invisible challenges that come with the imperceptible changes of becoming someone new. But I had sort of hoped that there was an unspoken guarantee that it would all get easier.

It didn’t. Life went on and it became harder and harder to feel like it was the miracle everyone told me it was.

I have been explaining all this to my psychologist, Henry, who I started seeing when I was very sick. I report that I’ve been googling the symptoms for an anxiety disorder. “I feel buzzy,” I say. “Like I’m alert but it’s not useful . . .” He explains that what I have might not technically be a disorder if what I’m alert about (cancer! loss!) is concrete and likely imminent. How comforting. Perhaps it is the feeling that philosopher Martin Heidegger described about the moment people awaken to their own helplessness. This is the thrownness of life, Heidegger explained, the way we cannot choose our future. We drift between currents like helium balloons in the sky.

I know how today will go because it was the same feeling yesterday. I will feel like I was supposed to get to something—some list? some task? some relationship?—that gives me back a sense of fullness. There, I did it. But when I pile up every effort and attempt at completing something, it is only then that I can see the unfinishedness of it all. The poet Anne Sexton was right: “I am a collection of dismantled almosts.”

Eventually I will notice the ridiculous wastefulness of all my efforts to be smarter, thinner, kinder, and entirely up to date on international affairs (and the latest season of Love Island). Sometime before bed I will have to reckon with the amount of time I spent finding wide shoes on the internet for the modern paddle-footed woman or trying to cycle off the thirteen pounds gained on last summer’s camping trip from Hades. What I thought was progress was probably an imperceptible decline. The patron saint of the middle-aged woman, Nora Ephron, said of all this effort: “Maintenance is what they mean when they say, ‘After a certain point, it’s just patch patch patch.’ ”

I would gladly say any of this out loud, but I alternate between feeling embarrassed, justified, and like a closet narcissist. It feels like wanting more shouldn’t be a question at all. A person who almost lost everything should know precisely the value of everything kept and everything lost. I should be too grateful to ask for more.