Cockamamie House Physics

The house by the river is gone. (Obviously the house by the river is not gone. It’s brick and tile and concrete; and my children might stop in St. Mary’s one day with their children and say, “That was my grandparents’ house. But it was much larger back then.”)

But it is gone from me, and now it is gone from my mother and my sister and my brother. I wonder what happens to a place when you can’t be present in it any more. Best I can tell from physics, action heats the air, which causes it to expand, so a house stays puffed out to its correct size. When you’re gone for awhile the air cools and the house shrivels in on itself, which is why all grandparents’ houses are absurdly small, like playhouses, when you drive by them 20 years later.

What is also gone is the stage upon which we played out our adult relationships, so now this is a road show. Now we have to get organized, make plans, articulate desires. We have to puff up a place on the fly, without the scripts and props we’ve been using for 20 years. Now it’s our show.

Screw all the feels

Last night I reread a NYT piece about medicating women’s feelings, and had the same reaction that I had to an Atlantic piece from a couple of years ago about the wisdom of menopause.

Why should women’s temporary emotional states, especially those so heavily influenced by hormones, be elevated to wisdom, but men’s heightened hormone-induced emotional states should be considered some kind of biological poisoning?

I am in my mid-50s, so I’m writing from the trenches here. I have lived the sleeplessness and the feeling that I’m in a rental body. If I become convinced that, in spite of all the evidence, my wonderful, affectionate husband no longer loves me and is just looking for the moment to tell me he’s leaving, and spend a day confusing my family with my uncontrollable sobbing, I am not “expressing some hidden wisdom.” I am in the center of a hormone storm, and it takes what few shreds of discernment I can muster to keep from saying something awful, because the only thing I can cling to in the deluge is the vague hope that I won’t feel this way tomorrow. That’s not wisdom. It’s an emotional hallucination, brought about by a physical chemical imbalance.

We would never tell a woman with postpartum depression that it’s a natural part of life and that she should embrace it with grace and learn from it’s wisdom. That would be stupid and cruel. We don’t tell a man in a testosterone-fueled rage that he is accessing valuable intuition.

I cannot understand the desire to turn the estrogen fluctuations into something deeper, or the urge to recast the expression of the most primitive parts of our brain into some new kind of rationality that only women get to have.

Give me the pill. Real life is too astounding, complicated, and short to waste time on imaginary horrors.

I was raised by wolves

I was not raised in a barn, or by circus clowns, or by hobos. I have impeccable manners when I need to, two different Emily Post reference books, and can differentiate engraving from thermography from across a room.

What I do not have is an iota of sentiment. I don’t even know how to fake it. I only learned the concept of “too soon” by seeing other people tear up when I asked about their new dog, and have also learned that not every family replaces pets within 24 hours.

We always had a dog growing up. For 16 years we had a smallish black poodle/rat terrier mix named Ashes, who was my dad’s constant companion. Dad would sing opera (really just “O solo mio, dum de dum dum” over and over again), and Ashes would throw back his head and howl along. They shared popsicles. The dog got old and blind, and one night was hit by a car in front of our house. My father sat on the deck with Ashes in his lap and cried like a baby, like he had never cried before. We sat around him, sobbing and helpless.

And the next day we got Lars. So these are my people.

Tomorrow I go to pack my mother for her move to North Carolina. We will throw away her wedding dress, pictures, papers, gifts, books, and anything left that belonged to my father (tennis trophies and handkerchiefs, mostly). It will be the last time I’ll see the house on the river, or sit at the countertop drinking box wine and eating cheese cubes.

What emotions does a normal person experience at a time like this? I am genuinely curious, but wouldn’t trade away this weird handicap. Right now it feels like my superpower.