A deafening quiet

 Why can’t we just say what we want?

What we really want. 

We all tend to think if we did, life would be better.

That’s not always the case. 

The truth doesn’t always make things better. 

Yet it should be ours to limit.

Why do we just smile and say “Of course, it’s ok,’ when everything inside us is screaming “THIS IS SO FAR FROM OK THAT THE LIGHT FROM OK WILL TAKE SIX MILLION YEARS TO REACH THE PLACE I AM NOW.”

That wide, tight smile doesn’t fool anyone.

Not talking about it is easier.

Of course, it’s OK … even if it makes us sad.

Life, as we all know, isn’t fair.

It’s barely just.

Are we trying to level our inherent awkwardness? The natural urge to smooth over all that presents the world as a sense of discomfort? To make the intolerable quiet and polite?

Why must we wallow in our worst thoughts?

The chip on our shoulder slowly erodes our range of mobility until we are stuck in one place.

It doesn’t need to be this way. We could just go with the flow.

Why fight against strong currents? They’ll just drown you where they wear you out.

Sometimes saying what we want or need opens possibilities. If done correctly, with thought at understanding, the simple voicing of desires can change trajectories for the better. And sometimes it can embolden the worst.

A shift in current doesn’t sway everyone. 

Of course, I can’t tell you how the stars align to produce either scenario, however, I feel luck must have something to do with it.

The daily news is nothing more than a case in point that luck may be a double-edged sword.

Those who bill themselves as wiser will helpfully explain that a lot of it comes from being prodigious in the art of choosing battles.

If I were someone else I might self-soothe with alcohol or more recently decriminalized mind-altering substances. But I have enough trouble with regular realities.

Like all the things in the news for the last half-decade that have done nothing to allay our worries. 

That states’ rights would supersede human rights.

That the highest court of the land – in the same week no less – would entertain the notions that some states won’t be required to preserve the health or life of women experiencing pregnancy-related emergencies – and that Presidents of the United States can’t do their jobs effectively if they aren’t immune from criminal prosecution. 

I must admit, I didn’t know there was a “Tunes In To Oral Arguments of The Supreme Court” years old, and that I started celebrating it two years ago without realizing it was a milestone.

What’s more, I didn’t realize I would find myself so incredulous about the decisions that seem opposed to the ideals of our democracy.

I have also reached the age that, while I disagree with arresting student protestors I hope that the law is still robust enough to ensure their day in court will absolve those who speak out with conviction no matter how disquieting.

I have to believe that the truth and good faith will prevail. 

Surprise, party of two

“Wanna go out?”

For a second I floundered. As I stood in the kitchen, gazing absently into a refrigerator packed to its edges with leftovers wavering within a wide range of decrepitude, I looked at the boy who spoke those three words with a dubious expression.  

That is not how the last teenager of the household usually answers when I ask him what he’d like to eat for dinner. 

“You want to go out?”

I had heard him right, evidently, but my mind still wasn’t processing the information.

Usually, he shrugs in silence, or mutters under his breath that he’ll find something to eat when (or if) he gets hungry. The idea of leaving the house for food holds no cache. Then, maybe around midnight, he’ll make his way to the stove to grill a few sandwiches, leaving a pile of dishes in the sink, a precariously wrapped block of cheese in the fridge, and the lingering aroma of bacon for me to handle. 

I can tell from the smell of the air … even hours later … that whatever it was he made was made to perfection.

Sometimes, I’m not going to lie, I mind. 

Especially when I’ve already emptied the dishwasher, stowed the cleaned plates and wiped down all evidence of residual cookery from the countertops before bed. He might have just said what it was he’d prefer to eat instead of creating a midnight garden of good and evil while I slept. 

I also tend to become annoyed by his indecisiveness, which, yes, I realize, he also gets from me.

He may act annoyed; an emotion I accept without hurt feelings, understanding that his preference for food has always seemed incredibly personal. A quirk of nature he probably, if I am to be honest with myself, has acquired not through habit or laziness, but just from swimming around in my gene pool.

Although no one usually has to ask me twice about leaving the cooking to someone else.  Someone who doesn’t need to feed the first through fourth pancakes to the dog. Someone like my son.

Sometimes he seems like an alien, and other times it’s like looking in a mirror and seeing myself with a three-day stubble of beard.

But not today.

Today, as the kid stood in the doorway twirling the looped end of his car’s keys – the unsaid yet unmistakable sign that he is willing to drive – I did not mind. I wasn’t even annoyed.

 And even though we kicked around ideas of types of food and restaurants that might be open on a Monday: Googling, passing names and tastes back and forth until we agreed on a place, I had to admit feeling a little excited.

He’s had his license a few scant weeks, and yet I find myself surprised that I don’t have to cajole him out of bed or hound him not to be late. He’s already gone by the time I knock on his door. 

As I had hoped, he met the new responsibility with a new maturity.

And he didn’t mind sharing a meal in public with his old mom.

Unlike other surprises – say a dozen or more friends and family hiding in our darkened living room, ready to jump out when I turn the lights on – this was the type of unexpected invitation that was so spur of the moment that I couldn’t possibly raise concerns or my blood pressure. 

He just had a hankering for shrimp tacos.

Looking up

It was mid-afternoon on an otherwise ordinary Monday for us “work-from-homers.” But for my son, who was lounging around the house in his PJs, it was an imaginary snow day, which in the first quarter of the 21st century, is just a way for schools to make a springtime withdrawal of banked time that, historically, had been allotted to winter folly when blizzards turned carting kids around into an unduly hazardous pursuit. 

It seemed kismet that on this day, celestial bodies had literally aligned to provide a special show all the same. 

My husband had set up chairs in the backyard and texted his son no fewer than 68 times since accidentally awakening the kid, drill-sergeant style, to get ready for his non-existent school day. 

“T minus 12 minutes until the start of the eclipse,” he heralded, on the never-ending loop of texts he sent to our phones as a kind of countdown.

“You don’t want to miss it!”

“There won’t be another one for like 27 years!”

… “Hey!” 

“Anyone?”

“*Grumble, grumble, all I ever get is the sound of crickets*!”

I would have responded but I was still scouring our house, looking in closets and through drawers for the pristine, cardboard light-filtering glasses I had saved from a college family weekend last fall. We didn’t heed the advice of the welcoming committee and set an alarm to “look up” between 10 and 10:35 on the second morning of our reunion - October 14. My mistake caused us to miss the annular eclipse entirely as well as the continental breakfast to commemorate the solar event.

Instead, I summoned my phone to text my son, and asked the boy to acknowledge his father’s request, knowing a response from a silent teenager would be a welcome blip on the flatlining radar. 

“Mom is looking for the creepy glasses she kept from the last 3D movie we saw when I was 8 … or something,” he jested. 

“Tell her to just Let it Go  … I have enough welding helmets for everyone. I don’t want any of us to miss this one!”

“Found them!

“... Trunk of the car, go figure!”

Oddly, I felt excitement by the time the three of us were gathered on the patio, slouching in the nylon chairs as our heads rested on the seat backs while we stared into the sun. 

The least of which correlated to what our filter-protected eyes could see: the moon slipping over the sun, slowly swallowing her up. 

Nor did the quieting of birds as the sky darkened rev my heart as much as the sudden realization that along with the … million people looking up at this very moment, the fourth member of our household was probably seeing the magic of the cosmos, too, even though she was hundreds of miles away.

I texted her a picture of the three of us in our get-up, and the best image of the eclipse I could manage without a similar filter for its mechanical eye. 

We were all there … 

The dad in his welding mask,

 The boy spun the glasses around his index finger like a set of car keys, with an expression that said:  “I came, I saw, and I wonder now how long I’m supposed to stay out here?”

And me … with my cardboard shades … smiling up at the sun.

…. 

“So that’s where those glasses went! I've been looking for them everywhere.”

Wish or command(ment)?

In his book, “Get Married,” Brad Wilcox, presents a stilted case for why “Americans must defy the elites, forge strong families and save civilization.

Waving cherry-picked data from recent surveys about a decreased interest in marriage and family, especially among younger women, Wilcox sounded the alarm.  

Citing a six-point difference in marriage interest between women and men who identify as single and childless, Wilcox places most of his emphasis on trying to establish that women are the problem. As if all they need to do is look at the data showing older married women answer the happiness surveys affirmatively. 

America, he heralds, will suffer if more women don’t heed their biological clocks.

Joining his chorus this week was NYT columnist, Nicholas Kristof. Citing Wilcox in his own call to arms for the institution because “it is worth fighting for marriage,” Kristof, it seems, is willing to go to the mattresses on his belief that married people are happier people. 

And as one woman after another tweeted to the contrary in their general direction, they “gently push back” with more unsubstantiated statistics. 

Why must everything be a fight?

The histrionics of happily married men, holding up graphs, telling women they are the problem, is nothing new. 

This is just a rehashing of conservative laments about the problems of increasing secularization in a society founded on religious freedom. 

But the only thing I can glean from this survey is that some men are willing to watch their kids on occasion, maybe coach a team here and there, and some women don’t want to risk their health and lives, and then have to manage all the other logistics while working similar hours or putting careers on hold.

Wilcox tends to spin the numbers showing there are 24 hours in a day and men and women work similar hours whether it be paid labor or domestic drudgery. 

As you look more closely at Wilcox’s insistence that married women are happiest, try to understand that none of these studies can prove the cause of that happiness is marriage without randomized pairings. And randomized pairings – despite sometimes being highlighted in reality shows like Married at First Sight – aren’t exactly a study ethical scientists would recommend. 

Removing the pro-marriage studies, social science still shows that men do better and are happier in marriage than women. Even if you think the division of labor is a petty reason it is a harbinger of other more insurmountable dissatisfaction.

And this “fight” that Mr. Kristof has recommended has me wondering, just who are we supposed to battle? Single people? Women? Will we enact laws that make it easier to marry? More difficult to divorce? Some combination of the two?

Abusive partners often use therapy to their advantage, weaponizing terminology to more effectively control their victims.

They also do the same with the courts.

So you might imagine what it looks like for women after these guys manage to jettison access to no-fault divorce. Claiming abuse for divorce will require an exemption from a court, the same way women find themselves pleading for abortion exemptions only to be rebuffed. 

 

The worst part is marriage isn’t heading for extinction. People will always be willing to enter them willingly and of their own accord and exit them for reasons that are truly none of Mr. Wilcox's or Mr. Kristof's concern.

But if recent history in politics offers any clue, what may be heading for extinction is a person’s ability to choose the direction of their lives and to change that path for themselves.