Simultaneously mild and tempestuous, it is spring and April and as busy as ever. The center of our house is in disarray – although it’s a neat and orderly mess for the most part. There are no weekend projects anymore. Everything stretches out in an endless fashion. I am constantly reaching for something that is not where it was the day before.
I am feeling weird, and suddenly old and forgetful – I schedule my runs on my calendar so that I remember them. I contemplate doing that with F’s Friday brown bag lunches as well, since I’ve forgotten them twice now. She swears it’s three times, but she’s prone to exaggeration.
Each morning, while brushing the sleeping knots out of her hair, I’d dance around the topic of her hair, trying to give her a space to talk about it without clamming up or pushing back. She said the kids are always asking her now why she got “bangs”, and she doesn’t like that. She finally told me that she’d taken a pair of scissors to them in a moment of frustration. She was working on a project and her hair kept tumbling down across her eyes and so she thought chopping those stray hairs off would solve the problem. And it did, but of course we noticed. She hadn’t counted on that, so she wasn’t prepared.
After this confession, she started to cry, big gulping sobs, and buried her head into my chest. She cried like this for several minutes, and when her breathing started to return to normal, I broke out my most maternal-know-it-all voice and said “doesn’t it feel so good to finally tell the truth instead of hiding things away?”
She wiped her forearm across her face, and afterwards it had changed. Her eyes flashed angrily, defiantly, as she replied “Absolutely not.”
I can understand that. I do things in haste sometimes, hardly thinking beyond the moment, and then regret quickly sets in. I don’t particularly want to talk about it, be reminded of it, or dwell on it. There are a thousand things I don’t do well. Let me stumble through them until I nail something, and can lift my head again. Tilt my chin at just the right angle, release the tension in my jaw, ignore the tickle of baby fine hairs as they slowly grow back down my forehead.
