there is more in this world than fear and pee

I take a walk and do the exercise my therapist taught me: something I can see, something I can hear, something I can smell, something I can feel, something I can taste. At first I can’t remember the fifth sense, and I worry it’s a sign of a problem with my brain (other than the ones I know about: the ruminations, the anxiety, the sadness that touches down like a tornado). Or it’s lack of coffee. I’m walking to a coffee shop.

I like this exercise because it’s also a writing exercise, and I like the words that offer themselves: clicking crow, ladies gathered for cafecito, the sugar and oil of cooking pastries on the breeze. I try to taste my tongue and it feels slightly burnt, which is not a taste, and…is that something I should worry about?

Dash is worried about my work trip next week. And angry and sad. He says he’s going to miss me so much that he wants a different mom, one who doesn’t ever have to travel for work. I try to explain how that makes no sense, but doesn’t it actually make perfect sense? The desire to annihilate because love is too painful? 

It’s potty training weekend for Joey—not the first and probably not the last—and at least a half dozen times yesterday, I tossed towels on puddles of pee, sprayed various solutions. Also: handed out stickers, cheered, bribed with fruit gummies and screen time. We need to do this before he transitions to the preschool classroom next month, and my brain has twisted the deadline into “before I become too sick to do the things that C.C. is not good at, the things that require scheduling and consistency.” She is good at playdates and birthday parties and making sure Dash has all the right gear for baseball. She is good at the emotional things, at stitching sourness into something sweet again, at playing got-your-nose with Joey. But I keep thinking that if I die, they may never brush their teeth again. 

The Times ran an article I didn’t read—maybe I should have, maybe I didn’t have to—about undocumented immigrants making plans to hand off their children. The comments weren’t even the most MAGA/unhinged, and still they said Why not take their children with them? and Why did they come here illegally in the first place? 

As if they’ve never felt the unbudging stone walls of a rock and a hard place. Or maybe they have, and they are just bad at making the translation to rocks that aren’t shaped exactly like theirs. 

Photo by Louis Hansel on Unsplash

This week Andrea Gibson, a queer poet whose work I should have known but didn’t, died of cancer at one year older than I am now, and my feed was full of their words. Their poetry gave Mary Oliver, that abundant phrasing that marvels at this world, winks at sadness but doesn’t give it purchase. The friends who wrote Andrea’s obituary said Andrea desperately wanted a longer life but emphatically believed they had an awesome life. I held to that first part: even the enlightened want more more more. And also to what Andrea wrote about discovering a wide life, not a long one. And while I believe it would be better for my kids to lose a good mom than have a truly bad one breathing down their necks for years, what would be best is to have a good-enough mom greeting them each morning with her coffee breath, saying I’m proud of you to the point of annoyance, saying I don’t want to send you away but I really need you to go to summer camp today because I am potty training your brother. For a long, long time. I want long and wide. I want the fucking Mississippi.

The coffee shop I’m in is called Kindness & Mischief. My latte is from the Kindness side of the menu, because everything on the Mischief side cost more. The curly-haired baby next to me is the cutest. Outside, a toddler made a run for the street corner, and her big sister, in a firefighter’s jacket, chased after her. Good work, everyone, said their parents and grandparents.

I have been thinking lately about how much time I used to spend in coffee shops. Somehting in my biology needs the chattering hum, the smell of espresso, the gradient of a green tea latte not yet stirred. The hard bench beneath my thighs. The taste of black sesame and caramel. All five senses to dull my (hopefully) lying sixth sense that everything is wrong. 

There is a woman in line wearing bike shorts and a T-shirt that says To crush your enemies see them driven before you and to hear the lamentation of their women. 

Her friend has a Chiquita banana shirt that says Ready, set, peel! But I read it as Ready, set, pee! 

I am here to remember that there is more in this world than pee and fear. There is this mysterious T-shirt. There is this dog with little blonde eyebrows. There is this other dog, who looks like a descendant of the ones who ran around Mexican pyramids. There are people who probably eat as poorly as I do and aren’t dying. Or maybe they are. There are fake plants and real ones. The letter I plan to mail, here next to my laptop, to a friend whose favorite true crime stories are the family annihilator ones. 

Andrea, I’m trying.