Susan Senator

I was crying a lot this past week, but it ended well. Does that make it okay? At some point, do we run out of I did this, but at least it ended like that. Is there a limit on how many bad days one member of a family can have?

Writing this now I can scarcely remember why I was so weepy. But I do know that it had a lot to do with feeling disconnected from my family. I felt so irreconcilably different from the four of them. They — we — are all such islands. But I’m an island that wants at least to be a peninsula, attached somehow. (What an ugly, stupid metaphor.) Ben is enjoying his winter vacation from inside the depths of Hyrule. He surfaces occasionally for  12 o’clock breakfast or a 3pm lunch. He has too many oreos, not enough exercise. Yet he is increasingly muscular, taller than me, lanky, gorgeous acne’ed teenager. He still lets me in a little, showing me cute or freaky stuff on the Internet.  He is deeply attached to me, somehow; I feel it.

Max is home from college for the month, out every night, up late, sleeping late, when he’s here he’s with his girlfriend. We did have him to ourselves on Thursday, and on that day Ned and I got him to take a walk with us. We went, of course, to Starbucks. Even without Nat that is a perfect short walk, up our street, down the hill, across Route 9, and into The Village. I get a skinny vanilla latte, Max gets a hot choc, and Ned gets decaf and a slice of the cake-like bread. We share it, cramped around a small table. I love this.

I don’t know what we talked about; maybe the different genres of computer games. Some about Max’s classes and floormates. I just drank in the beauty of him and his life, along with my toasted-marshmallow-flavored drink. We walked home and got there just in time for Nat’s van.

That night Ned made dinner, not me. One of the things we realized, he and I, was how much I’ve been hating dinner. Really hating it, not like funny-hating it. It’s been almost painful for me, from 3pm on, to come up with an idea of what each person will actually like, something not too fattening for me. To then wait until around 6:30 to start it, because Ned has to finish work. Not to snack until then.

And then, the dinner itself. If all the boys are there, it can be just as bad as if none are there, because they all have their own things going on, and they are not sharing nothin’. I sit there, with my spare plate and look at their full plates and their full lives — even Nat’s is full and ahead of him, but is it the life he wants? — and not knowing that, and yet seeing them in their fullness and potential, I want to leave.

The geography cure, a long-ago therapist once called it.  How can I be this ungrateful for everything I have? But there it is, I’d been getting in my car all last week and fantasizing about driving and driving, away.  I finally told Ned; “told,” ha, that’s a good one. We had a huge nasty fight. They all heard it, Goddammit.

How much more can I say I’m sorry?  All I can do is keep trying harder. But then my life feels like one big TRY.  All that helps is for some time to pass, for them to see that I’m okay, it was just a bad day.

Usually I clear my plate before everyone else and clean, clean, clean while they eat. My mind is on being in a different room, away from them. That makes me sad, and I don’t know why I feel that way. What I know is it is so different from when I’m in Starbux with them. Our  Starbux date is a moment in time, aware and crystalline, surrounded by earthy chocolatey smells and people on break, just wanting to be there for that brief time. Creature comforts of heat, of sweet aroma, and of satisfying our hunger and thirst. Starbux is the new communal cave, where the hot drinks bond us like fire.

When Ned made dinner Thursday — and it was a dinner that Max came up with and helped with — I felt so privileged. I felt royal. I was the Princess, the one female in the house, and it was special that night. I found I could sit, and stay, linger and listen. I could live there, after all.