I started this essay while sitting at Reavilleen staring at the green valley below, watching sheep and horses roam the same field and listening to the bray of the protective donkey with his herd in the pasture below us. The rain lifted in clouds of white as they dumped their buckets, and then it brightened again, and the sun became a glaring white button behind the steel sky.
It seems very …. incorrect... to be here in Ireland while Tom is in California, but Clare and I must tend to the house and garden before both are reclaimed by the damp and brambles. Houses don’t like to be left alone in this climate. They brood, grow mildew, collect spider casing in the corners, and the electrical items go on hiatus, as we found out when we arrived to no water, no internet, the fridge not cooling efficiently, and flashing lights everywhere as all the appliances complained about their period of neglect. Apparently there had been lightning while we were gone and the pumphouse breaker had tripped. Cycling filtration cannisters emptied out the lines, and poof, pressure was gone; everything stopped. It was three days before we had hot water to shower and before we broke all the airlocks in the lines. I thought to myself: why do I have to endure all this myself? Being here without my husband STINKS. There’s no denying his help would be a blessing, but then I think about how much Clare has pitched in. She stood and held screwdrivers, fished out headlamps, and patiently defrosted the refrigerator with a hairdryer as I repaired the motor that had an icy hangup. She waded out into the garden with me and hacked down the sproutlings of sycamore maple that had shot up from the cut stumps. She debated about taking out the fuchsia that obscured the thorn tree we both admire. Then she dove into the spider encrusted branches with her clippers and just started cutting, a very un-Clare move. She stands at the sink and patiently hand washes her dishes, though I remind her that she’s not at college anymore, and there’s a dishwasher here. She scrubs the toilets and sinks in both upstairs bathrooms, and vacuums the flies from the windowsills. She even made my bed for me on the first night we arrived, because I was trashed from the long international overnight flight and had all the beds to make up before we could sleep. In short, she’s not a child that needs looking after anymore. Indeed, some days she’s looking after ME. This has been this trip’s wonderful discovery. The other discovery has been how adaptable the heart can be. Metaphorically, and in fact. While Tom’s heart is undergoing radical healing after his bypass surgery, my heart is figuring out how to propel myself forward without my partner of 27 years beside me every day. The first few weeks were very rough, and Clare kept checking on me because she could see the tightness around the edges of my mouth and in my middle-distance gaze. It is quite something to be cared for by your child when you are feeling weak and vulnerable, as the years I spent caring for her while she developed into a human seemed long at the time and now too short as they are gone. One minute you’re in it and it’s hard, and the next you’re out and baffled at where the time went. Just yesterday we were talking about where on earth I wanted to live when I eventually retire and she said “well, I assume you’re going to want to live close to me,” and I caught my breath. Did I? Do I? I made a small joke about moving into a granny unit in her backyard and being a small quiet mouse who just cooked elaborate meals and gardened and wrote poetry every day. Just the fact that she assumed I’d be close was very touching. Humbling almost. I raised a kid who wants to be around me?! For like... a long time? Fascinating. And fabulous. This may be my greatest accomplishment. May it last. In the meantime, we video call Tom everyday to check in on him. We recount the saga of the horses in the lower field (are we friends now? Why after five years has Frankenhorse finally let me touch him?) and the news about our Irish friends (birthdays, debs, art shows, tantrums, disappointments, and triumphs) and get the news on the dog, fishes, and plants. Phone calls just aren’t enough though. Being 5000 miles away from my person for months is not my jam. Clare and I have lots of talks about proximity, relationships, and friendships that require keeping close ties when distance separates you. We shared that adult friendships are harder to maintain because it takes work. You are no longer bound by proximity (work, school, or clubs that require you to be physically in the same place at the same time) and you must work hard to show up and share. She’s finding this to be the case when she’s away from university and her friends are scattered back to their respective homes. Even though the occasional text or call will put a bandage on the sense of loss in the short term, it is truly physical time that stitches together a deep relationship. When you’re apart those stitches can come unraveled. I’m trying to think of this summer as the ultimate girl trip, a mother/daughter hurrah to build memories and learn about each other as adults. So far, it’s been eye opening. There’s a beauty that comes with age and the experience of handling the delicate edges of your child’s personality. We can speak with the candor that earlier moments wouldn’t have allowed because there was too much person-building to be done. She’s finally at the age where she can see both forward and backward and apply the stories she hears about Tom’s and my lives to her understanding of who we are as people and not just as parents. I watch her brain process sometimes and it’s a beautiful thing. Her eyes narrow and her face goes soft as she listens. It’s almost as though she’s trying to look past herself and into the moment of time being described without applying it to the person in front of her. It’s a physical understanding of something, layered and deep, just as we would all hope our children will do when they have grown enough inside and out. Today she is out on a boat in the middle of Kinsale harbor, learning to breathe underwater. While she has a tank and regulator and a dive buddy, I still worry about her in the deep. I realize now that I am learning to breathe underwater, too. This scare with Tom has me thinking about how I will handle my boat in the future as the storm squalls threaten. I need to remember to continue to breathe as the air presses in. To ask for help if I’m too tired to swim anymore. It’s hard when you’re panicked and flailing and thinking you might drown, but it’s the only way back to shore. We traveled with Clare extensively when she was a child, so we consider her a citizen of the world. Her first CA road trip was at 5 ½ months; she lived in Rome for a season when she was 2; lived in Ireland for a summer when she was 4; lived in Florence for a month as I taught a study abroad trip when she was 9; lived in a farmhouse in Glengarriff for a summer when she was 13; now the lucky girl has a lovely little bedroom at Reavilleen that overlooks both the hillside and the sea. I’m not going to lie, some of those early trips were not easy, but looking back on the snapshots of them softens the myriad mishaps. She was an only child, bound to our schedules as professors, and we often just tucked her under our wing and flew headlong into whatever plan we hatched with our art, writing, or careers. She was patient with our quests, content to immerse herself in museums, nature, food, or simply sit in a square, reading. I privately think she must enjoy the stories we tell about her running around our tiny grotto house in Positano, or singing in Italian at the top of her lungs in Rome, or hanging off door knockers in Florence like a jungle-gym, or throwing endless sticks for border collies at our rented farmhouses in Ireland.
Tom and I bought Reavilleen when she was 13, turning 14 and she only had a few short years of living in the house on and off before she graduated high school this last summer and we shipped her off to University. What a shock to the system that was! She was bound to our schedules when she was young, then we were bound to her grade school schedule, traveling only during her breaks, and now…. everything has broken open. Even though she is living in the dorms on campus at UCSC, it somehow felt wrong for us to pick up and fly 5,000 miles across the sea for a few months at a time. All the “what ifs” set in, and as a person naturally predisposed to imagining worst-case scenarios, I found it impossible to imagine putting that many miles between myself and my child. The safety net of having meals on campus, a resident attendant in her dormitory, and other fail-safes the university imposes did little to quell my fears that she would feel abandoned and adrift, forced to grin and bear whatever hardships arose because we weren’t in proximity to help. Her first week on campus squelched all those fears. She sent us photos of her with heaps of new friends, frolicking in the redwoods running along the backside of her dorm, and in the rolling golden hills in front of campus. I can’t help but think that her room at UCSC is a mirror image of her life at Reavilleen. A place with a view of the sea and the hills (reverse brown to green) and a comfy place to read, sketch, study, and relax. What is different for me is that she is physically missing in the house. My days are like sweater that has stitch loose and all I see when I wear it is that dodgy bit, not the comfortable beauty of the whole. Enter Facetime and other blessed technologies. We no longer have to rely on costly international phone calls to keep in touch. Sundays are for connecting and there is no better sound than the jingle of Facetime to bring her near. Trying to make conversations appear seamless with our rural WIFI is a dance of timing and breathing as our images are beamed up to satellites and then back down again half a world away. The lags create little ripples of frustration as the technology can’t keep up with our enthusiasm to share in our short allotted time. We make it work because we must in order to create a new normal. Nothing quite prepares you as a mother to place your child in a room and walk away after 18 years of constant immersion in their daily business. We didn’t just walk away, though. We drove away a couple hundred miles home to Orange County, too far to travel comfortably should something come up, but flyable if we have the cash. Then we got on a plane and jetted 5,000 miles away and the break was complete. In the beginning, it was novelty that floated my days. Hey! We launched a human! Then as the weeks went by we settled into being comfortable with being uncomfortable not knowing where she was, how late she was staying up, with whom she was spending time. I won’t lie, I would sometimes wake up at 3 in the morning in Ireland and poke the little Find My Friends button and see her wandering downtown Santa Cruz with her pals at all hours and my stomach would lurch. Now the sensation has morphed into a kind of physical ache and I am realizing that physical touch is what feeds me, and I am starving. Most mothers are constantly touched, starting with internally when the baby rolls around inside of you for months, then comes nursing, carrying the infant, holding hands for walking, enduring toys being crammed into our faces, our hair pulled, our earrings tugged, our bodies simply vessels for fun, comfort, solace. As our kids turn into teens they want to be touched less, I’m guessing as part of the process of achieving bodily autonomy, learning that they are separate for you and can ask for space, and perhaps that distance is meant to prepare you for when they leave home. It doesn’t. Nothing can. Every day I miss her morning hugs, the kind where she tips her head into my shoulder and lingers a while, as though considering the day and what it might bring. It always brought me pleasure when she did that, used my embrace as a little pause to feel safe and dream. When people ask how Clare’s adjusting to college life we are always quick to say, “Fabulously.” Then they ask, “And how are YOU adjusting,” and I joke back: “Badly.” But that’s not really true. We are so excited for her adventure; it’s hard to be sad when we consider the alternative – we could have had a child afraid to venture out into the world after the vagaries of high school and the tragedies of COVID, but we didn’t. She shook out her feathers, crumpled from quarantine and self-doubt, and found flight feathers underneath. What a thrilling discovery. So what if I have to endure the physical pain of being separated by half a world while she launches herself into the sky. I send her photos of horses and windswept valleys overlooking the Irish Sea. She sends me photos of wild turkeys and deer roaming the redwoods on her path to the top of campus near the Pacific Ocean. We leave each other silly videos showing our breakfasts, cute dogs, clips of our friends hamming it up, and messages filled with broken bits of previous conversations. We reply to long-ago sent photos and make jokes that no longer make sense. It’s odd, disjointed, fun, fulfilling, and sometimes baffling. From this jumbled mosaic I am learning the dance of mothering from afar, learning who I am when my body is separate from her, uncovering who I was before I was hers. Indeed, a thrilling discovery. The question I am often asked when we arrive back on whatever soil we left a few months before is, “When you’re here do you actually want to be there?” And the answer is always, YES. It’s a weird sort of longing that sets in the minute you arrive “home” from the opposite side of the globe and settle back into a routine. When we are in California there is a keen and distinct longing for a wet grass smell and the unpredictable clouds of Ireland. When we are in Ireland we immediately pine for the bright blue dome of sky and the smell of salt and sand hanging in the air in Costa Mesa. When here we miss the creature comforts of there, and then reverse that missing in the hours it takes to cross back through the time zones.
One of our friends in Ireland, Holger, made an astute observation that this might lead to a feeling of never being settled. While I can see his point (because I am the one that carries the burden of securing house and pet sitters for our journeys and this creates a constant sense of being tethered to the schedule of the next thing) it also sparks a sense of wonder at there always being something ahead. In fact, sometimes when we don’t have a return trip planned for Ireland we find ourselves mentioning maybes in conversation. “Maybe we will be back in April for…” or “maybe late June will work best…” and then before we know it one of those maybes takes hold and we have convinced ourselves of a date for our return. I think it helps root us in the cycle, to pin down a next so that now isn’t filled with longing. What never changes during this period of living on the edge of two seas are the friends and neighbors that weave together the patterns of our days. Unlike most people in urban areas of the States, we make it a point to get to know our neighbors, and they often turn into dear friends. In California we have Rick and Leigh Ann next door, Clare’s de facto second parents, and solid human beings that can be counted on for easy things like a cup of sugar, or hard things like making medical decisions for our dogs should things go awry. The gate that swings between our backyards has seen many things pass through over the years, from glasses of wine to ailing animals to single eggs when a recipe needs more than we have, to our own tired bodies when we just want to sit on each other’s couch and moan about work. I miss them as much as anything when we are here in Ireland, because they represent a wider circle of people on that side of the globe that make up the security of my life in CA. In Ireland that circle is widening the more we visit. It is difficult to make friends as an adult because you actively have to seek out people and try to align schedules that are increasingly hectic. Sitting at Scannell’s pub for lunch a few days ago I couldn’t help but eavesdrop on two women behind me chatting near the crackling fireplace as they shared a plate of fish and chips. One thanked the other for introducing her to a fellow German transplant to Ireland, but mentioned that she didn’t really have time to nurture a new friend, as the ones she had already were enough of a strain on her time. As a person who is always seeking to add people to her purse, this is a novel concept for me. Over the years I have experienced a sort of mourning as people come and go from my life, through choice or circumstance, and I now know that you must add a few new friends all the time to balance the chaff falling away. The effort is worth it. If COVID and its accompanying isolation and upheaval taught me anything it is that we need a network of friends to catch us when we feel ourselves falling through midair. Even though we have taught ourselves to live in insulated bubbles of houses full of stuff, it will never replace the need for connection through a shared human experience. Being a part of two lives on opposite sides of the globe underscores for me the importance of finding the threads that weave us together as humans, from sharing food, to helping to dig a trench or clear a gutter out of reach. I walk down lanes and pull weeds for people I don’t know on both sides of the globe. It just makes sense. While it may be empowering to think that we can survive on our own with just the wild yeasts we captured form the air to make our endless pandemic loaves of sourdough, the truth is that all bread spoils in a few days if there is no one to share it with. I think we have gotten too used to seeing the perfect lives of people captured on social media in clips; life is really just a jumbled movie with flapping edges that need cutting. The illusion is burst when we get a close-up to the realness of humanity. Sitting with that discomfort is what I’m finding to “be an adult” is all about. While part of me will never really grow up because I find much to laugh about in life, I feel an essential part of me shifting as I understand my place in the order of things. I’m meant to be a good friend to those who have room for a bit more madness, and to not mourn so much the loss of those who don’t. Tom and I acknowledge that we play charmed roles where we get to drop into the fast-moving lives of lovely people and see where it takes. We always laugh at the loop we experience in Ireland: friends hear we have arrived and word is passed around town via the pub grapevine. There is much hullaballoo about “catching up after you’ve settled,” then the calendar starts to shimmer with dates strung along like lights. As the trip ends, we cram in even more time with the “love to see you before you go’s.” Even though we all know we will be back before long, there is a novelty in the compressed time we have with each other. I see some friends in Ireland more frequently than a few long-held ones back in CA; I feel lucky that they take the time to incorporate two vagabond Americans into their rich and complex days. I am incredibly blessed to have nets on both sides of the globe into which I fall the minute I step off the plane and into the smell of cow and grass, or cars and palm trees. Catching up with people I love brings me a type of internal joy that literally tingles. It spreads through my plexus like an invisible thread that extends up through my head and keep me buoyant and moving forward when things seem bleak. I cannot deny though, that once the jet lag has worn off and all the friends and family in the area have been visited, that little filament begins to tighten around my heart, winds its way through my veins, and pulls me inexorably back again from the present here to the next there, and I wonder when I’ll be back again. A reciprocal action or arrangement involves two people or groups of people who behave in the same way, agree to help each other, or give each other advantages; in mathematical terms, it refers to a given quantity or expression that is multiplied to produce unity. Splitting our time between California and Ireland has taught me a deeper appreciation of reciprocity because it is deeply ingrained in Irish culture.
When friends and family come to visit us in Ireland, they always remark at how welcoming and friendly the Irish folks are. We agree, but often say they only see the top half of it. The bottom half reveals not just friendliness but a culture steeped in sharing and support that we lack in the U.S. Each time we encounter a problem in Ireland, whether it be with clogged drains, a broken cooker, a puzzling question about the well or boiler, an accident with stone or tool, we ask a friend and prepare ourselves for the onslaught of help. Sometimes a single phone call will summon a few folks to stand over the problem and look, considering how best to help, and sometimes a massive machine driven by a neighbor will lumber over the horizon to the rescue. As a woman who resents being “saved” from problems, I watch with a grateful heart and struggle to reckon with my desire to not feel helpless. As home owners who pride themselves in re-building our home in CA from the ground up, this profusion of help can be overwhelming. There is a shred of American rugged individualism that prevails and sometimes prevents us from asking for assistance. Or maybe it is the fact that if we ask for help in CA from a friend, there is a 95% possibility that we will be able to help them in return because we have the time, resources, object, or idea they require. In Ireland, we don’t have that arsenal of contacts and talents, and it leads to a sensation of impotence. Often, only after breaking a bunch of fingernails or tools, we cave and start calling. We get chided for not asking sooner, as so-and-so clearly knows someone who specializes in the problem. Perhaps our reticence is rooted in not wanting our friends to feel like we are leaning on them to solve our problems when we drop unbidden into their lives every few months. It is easy to feel like the ultimate blow-in when we show up and pile our questions onto the shoulders of folks working to make a living and leading their own rich, complex existences. Slowly, though, I am learning to ask and allow myself to be vulnerable, a position I do not take lightly. I realize people can say no, but they often don’t. I’ve begun deliberately placing myself in uncomfortable or vulnerable positions because I have realized that the risk of rejection doesn’t outweigh the reward of the sense of pride I feel at pushing my own boundaries. I’ve begun reaching out to people I “know” solely via the internet or Instagram and asking them to meet. I’ve begun actively cultivating friendships instead of being overly careful not to impose myself on the lives of my Irish acquaintances. I’ve begun asking for opinions and advice, while being careful not to be an “Ask-hole” who never puts good suggestions into play. I figure this is as good a time as any to reinvent myself, not as someone new, but as someone better. And that someone is more patient with the small spaces of discomfort that allow growth. As a person who hates to be beholden to anyone lest the payback is sharp, I’ve begun to build up a bank of IOUs that would have unsettled me before. There is a longstanding Irish pub tradition of buying a round of drinks for your group. Each person, in his or her turn, stands their round. If you don’t, you’re a true bollocks. Recently, we were at a birthday party, and P bought Tom and I drinks, but we left the party before we were able to return the favor. Before, that would have sent me in paroxysms of anxiety that our friend would think we were American boors, but slowly I am coming around to the idea that favors can hold. In the past I would have been keen to repay a kindness quickly lest hard feelings arose, but now I can see the long game. As Robin Kimmerer writes in her book Braiding Sweetgrass, “gifts . . . from each other establish a particular relationship, an obligation of sorts to give, to receive, and to reciprocate.” And unlike things we pay for which end our obligation to a transaction, an emotional exchange creates a bond in a relationship. The result of my newfound willingness to ask for what I need is that I see how brave true vulnerability can be. I’m still aware of that standing round left hanging, though! And I’m looking forward to paying it back in time. |