02 Apr LOVE HANGOVER

I’ve spent most of the last few weeks or so worrying about my 84-year-old mother, feeling unreasonable amounts of emotion for my 84-year-old mother, writing love poems for my 84-year-old mother, trying to get my 84-year-old mother to move in with us, making the argument like a wind-up parrot even as my husband repeated into my ear, “but I have a cold.”

And so in the last few days I succumbed to a Love Hangover. When my mother called yesterday and announced, with the confidence of a child, “My computer is broken again,” I put my face in my hands and rested it there for a long time. If I had closed my eyes just then, I might have gone to sleep.

Finally, I spoke: “Mom, It’s not broken. You’re getting e-mails, right?”

“Yes!” she said. “But there’s no sound!”

I am so tired. Yesterday we went grocery shopping, a 64-step procedure involving a trip to King Soopers’ promising sounding curb pickup, which delivered oh, half of the items we’d ordered on-line, followed by a trip to Whole Foods where I stealthed my way through the aisles, hatted and masked and gloved like a burglar, and Peter rearranged the car and stood by with squirt bottles of clorox and alcohol. And then we got the groceries to the staging area on our porch. And Peter imposed some kind of dating system and washing system and we filled the fridge, and, *presto!* half the day was gone.

My mom is still on the phone.

“There’s a volume knob,” I tell her. “It’s on the side of the iPad.”

“No, I tried that.” Is that triumph in her voice? The triumph of a generation who grew up fishing with their parents and making Knackebrod and playing bridge, also with their parents, before going cross country skiing, leveled at the generation who thought computers would be a good idea?

“It doesn’t work.”

“There’s nothing I can do for you then,” I muttered, the tide of unbearable love going out, out, nothing but wet sand and flopping fish and drowned plastic dolls all the way to the horizon.

This pandemic is a lot of things but the main thing it is, for me, right now, is tiring. When people suggest it’s a spiritual opportunity, I nod really hard, my mind so clean of content it practically sparkles.

I really, really, want it to be a spiritual opportunity. And maybe it would be, except I have this Tyrannosaurus I keep at home, under the stairs, and it eats all the food and all the spiritual horizons, and its name is my literary ego. You’d think it’d just amble off eastward and make a new home among the fracking rigs of Weld County, and let me meditate on love and death. But no, it purrs and naps. It rolls over on its bony spine and writhes happily on the rug, snapping its huge jaws, knocking its bony head into the credenza, making all the framed photos fall down. It’s a homebody. It’s not going anywhere.

I had two astrology readings late last year, fueled (as usual) by my question: How can my manuscript delight everyone who’s read it and still fail to sell??

One astrologer painted a nice picture of things lightening up at the end of March, and April being full of something called trines involving Uranus, planet of break-throughs, and all kinds of business partnerships being made, and a real ripsnorting creative spurt in the early summer, and happy days all the way until the end of the year. Lord I love that astrologer. She was funny, too. There was no mention of a pandemic, of agents and editors sent home, to shelter in place with their small children, delaying things for, oh, god — forever?

The other astrologer said in funereal tones. “Oh, Capricorns. And Cancers. You guys have had a rough go since 2018. And it’ll go like that until the end of this year.”

I listened to the tape of that reading last night and I could hear the horror in my voice as she laid this giant astro-turd upon me. Then my husband and I sat on the couch and I started to splutter and spit, and then I spat and shrilled and then I shouted at him and then the ceiling and then the goddesses and gods: I WILL NOT SUBMIT! I WILL NOT STOP! I WILL NOT STOP TRYING! FUCK THIS SHIT, I’M NOT SOME LET- GO BUDDHIST; I’M REALLY GOOD AT WHAT I DO AND I AIN’T QUITTING AND I DON’T CARE WHAT THE TIT NAT HANH SAYS OR BYRON KATIE OR MY ACUPUNCTURIST, I DESERVE THIS TO WORK OUT AND I AIN’T QUITTING!!!
My husband is so, so nice. He is SO nice. He nodded and said something like “yup.”

And then we went to bed and he threw his arms around me and we slept soundly, until 4 a.m., anyway, and then i got up and wrote this. But my tantrum cracked a little something open in me, something sort of jolly. On the road to enlightenment, I’ll take jolly. Baby steps.