In this installment of “Love, Recorded,” Matt must deal with his old fears as he prepares for three months without his family.
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A week before their trip to Korea, my wife is stressed and the baby is sleeping poorly. Falling asleep after midnight. Waking at 3 in the morning and wanting to play. Holding her arms and legs and saying she is hurt, apa.
It is almost the word for father, appa. It sounds the same.
Grace is 18 months old now. Still we can’t sleep unless she does. Still we are directly linked.
We wonder if what is bothering her is growing pains. She wants to be picked up, rocked. As you get older, you try to return to your youth. Even for babies.
It is as if she can sense my desire to put this week on pause. Before they leave and I am left. Before three months pass and she changes changes changes. Before I’m thousands of miles from the part of my life that marks time.
That is what it has been like, having a baby: I have come to measure days in height and weight, in new words, in comprehending this strange world and our places in it. Time is a thing of the flesh.
Without sleep, our tempers rise. We tell each other, Cathreen and I: You’ll be happy when I’m gone. We tell each other to stop fighting, to make these last few days a good memory for later. Grace pulls our hair if we try to lie down. She reaches her little hands under our ribs and pushes us up.
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Three months is not forever. Yet it is a sixth of Grace’s life so far. It is 6 inches, 5 pounds, 40 words. When they return, Grace will be a different person, or the same person, but clearer and with different influence.
Of course we will not be completely out of touch. I must remind myself. I will see them on the computer. We will talk, thanks to technology. I will not feel Grace’s shape in my arms, though. I will not smell her hair like pretzels when she sweats. I will not kiss her cheek or tickle her or feel her little arms latch around my neck when she gets scared or tired, or wants in particular to be loved. I will not be there.
I was telling a friend the other day how sad I will be, pretending I don’t already feel that sadness, like a storm dropping the pressure in the air. And he said something about how surprised they would be when they got back. I reminded him that they will not be strangers while they are gone, though he knew this. I was talking to myself.
We will not be out of touch.
We will not be out of touch.
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Two days before they leave, we go shopping for things they must take with them: medicine, gifts, pacifiers, toiletries, new toys for the plane. It is like they are starting another life, the amount of things we must buy. I feel sick with loss, though they sit beside me. I can feel myself picking a fight. I can feel the idea of abandonment sludging up from the mud of my past.
I feel helpless. I feel like I am buying them a life apart. I feel unloved. I feel I feel I feel I feel.
We have been holding back, trying not to reach a certain point, and I am putting that point already past us; I am bringing up dormant fears.
It is easy to explode. As we scream and shout, we feel ashamed that Grace can understand now. Maybe we have to, though. Maybe it is better to let it out now, while we can do it together.
I am afraid that Grace will feel like I have abandoned her, that I have disappeared. She is at a point, I fear, where she can understand enough to recognize the change, but not enough to know why, that I have not left her.
Your same old problems, Cathreen accuses me.
Yes, that is what they are. But I can’t help it. And that is part of why I’m crying: this is a pivotal age. I was two when I was adopted. I remember nothing, but I can never escape that time, nonetheless.
I cry and cry, with my daughter’s cheek to mine. Normally, she would pull away, but she must sense something different. She stays with me, silent, until I can pull myself together enough to wonder how this will affect her.
We apologize. We apologize to her. We hold her and try to comfort her and ourselves.
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I do not know how I will survive, I tell myself when I want to be dramatic. I tell myself I have a tendency to like to starve. I have gone on purges before, not eating for three days. But those purges were voluntary. Those were under my control.
It is not that I can’t live by myself. It is that your expectations change. When you start to think you can truly be with one person forever, that she could be with you, you give up on worries that maybe kept you alive. Like when to go grocery shopping, or who will love you, or even what you will eat for dinner, when no one else’s desires and needs are at play.
I like having the desire to fulfill my wife’s and baby’s desires.
I have forgotten how to crave one meal instead of another. I have forgotten how to decide to go to the movies, or when to turn off the TV.
My current plan is work. Distract myself. Rely on friends. Get excited about my book coming out in February. Talk to the Internet.
I signed up for Klout the other day, though, and every Klout-filled event had to do with something I’d posted about Grace: pictures, parenting failures, temper tantrums.
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We will not be out of touch.
We will not be out of touch.
I will have the cats, at least. The cats who have suffered the last 18 months in neglect. I remember my first two weeks in Korea, so unsure how to be myself, losing 20 pounds to culture shock. I can imagine this happening again. I wonder if the cats will be enough.
I have spent so much time these last three years with my family finding out who I am, through them, through being able to let go of guise after guise that they didn’t care about. I have spent so much of this column writing about my wife and child as a way of writing truly about myself.
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The morning they leave, Cathreen and I wake at 4:00 and shove things into the car. Many things will remain, to be lived among like ruins. They take my civilization with them.
I drive them to the airport and then help with the bags, which are overweight and incur a charge. Grace is nervous. I am trying not to cry. I want, for this moment, to be strong, to defy the image I have established of myself, secure enough at last to pretend for someone else’s sake. We have built our togetherness up such that we will withstand three months apart, of course.
There will be no tears now.
I walk with Cathreen to the bag check and watch her make her way through. Later, she will call me, wailing, and complain that this trip is harder than pregnancy. Later, I will break down when I see the stroller like a stripped-down skeleton in the trunk of the car. Later, I will pet the cats and reassure them that everything is fine, that I am enough.
We are separated for now by only a vinyl strap. Cathreen takes my hand and Grace pushes it away. I want to change this moment from feeling like an ending. I have an idea, to keep figuring myself out. To write a book online the way this column started and, as has always been the point here, to record the love I can give and receive as it changes and as it changes me. I will go online and see my daughter and wife. We will not be out of touch.
I will be alone but not alone. I will write about me by writing about us.
I reach over the strap again and take my daughter’s hand, so my wife can take mine. We stay like that for a moment. I can feel my daughter’s baby heat rising, my wife’s grip tightening. And then the line moves, and we step forward together before we have to part.
–photo Flickr/walkinguphills
*Hug* it must be so tough and lonely without them. I can only imagine. This is beautiful as always. On the bright side, I’m looking forward to your book and to seeing you in march!!! Xoxo