{"id":1656,"date":"2010-07-17T08:10:03","date_gmt":"2010-07-17T12:10:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/?p=1656"},"modified":"2010-07-17T08:11:18","modified_gmt":"2010-07-17T12:11:18","slug":"something-so-right","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/2010\/07\/something-so-right\/","title":{"rendered":"Something So Right"},"content":{"rendered":"

You got the cool water<\/em><\/p>\n

when the fever runs high.<\/em><\/p>\n

–Paul Simon
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

In the book I’m reading<\/a> the character Nana says, “All my life it took me two tries to get anything right. And all of a sudden I’m old.” But she wasn’t sad, because this made it all the sweeter.\u00a0 I feel that this must be one of the themes running through my life.\u00a0 When I was coming back from my honeymoon, for instance, I turned to Ned, a propos to nothing, and said, “I don’t think I want to be married.”\u00a0 I really felt this way, coming back from two weeks in Italy.\u00a0 I was terrified.\u00a0 It may have all been about anticipating the roaches that I suspected were all over our new apartment.\u00a0 It may have been the foreign sturdiness of the word, “wife.”\u00a0 It may have been my fears about starting grad school soon.\u00a0 But there it was.\u00a0 Into my heart\/head and out of my mouth.<\/p>\n

Ned is not one of those people like me who needs to be wrong a few times to understand what right is; he is much clearer and steadier.\u00a0 Ned’s words and thoughts are, to me, like a deep underground mountain spring:\u00a0 not easily visible, but clean and bright when it surfaces.\u00a0 So Ned knew, he just knew, that I was being me even though I did not.\u00a0 He did not take my statement seriously — well, he did, in that he listened and respected my feelings and doubts — but he dipped into his deep well of knowledge, his feelings about me, and he did just the right thing.\u00a0 He did nothing.\u00a0 The feeling passed, and so did our plane ride.\u00a0 I’d like to say that this was the last time I ever had doubts about my married and grown-up self, but it was not.\u00a0 And all through these ugly periods, Ned has stood by me, while I make my damned mistakes, keeping me from drowning.\u00a0 Because that is how I get my knowledge.\u00a0 My certainty comes from fucking up numerous times.\u00a0 Not that Ned doesn’t make mistakes; it’s just that he learns about life differently than I do.<\/p>\n

The mother role was no less difficult for me.\u00a0 After we brought Baby Nat home from the hospital, I remember thinking, “Now what?”\u00a0 The pregnancy had had all of its drama of anticipation, the birth even more so, but now here I was with this little guy and long days stretched ahead of me.\u00a0 And this little guy did not act the way I expected him to.\u00a0 “Something’s wrong,” I said to Ned.\u00a0 “It feels like he doesn’t need me or something.”<\/p>\n

“What can you expect a baby to need from you?”\u00a0 Ned asked logically.\u00a0 And there you have it, the polar difference between us.\u00a0 I voice the dangerous rumblings in the earth and he stays safe in his pool.\u00a0 The beauty of our relationship is that we don’t stay apart in those places.\u00a0 We mix it up, he gets dirty, I get clean.\u00a0 The truth about Nat was somewhere in between.\u00a0 There was something different about him, even as an infant.\u00a0 Autism.\u00a0 But it’s taken me so many times to understand that this difference was not something wrong.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You got the cool water when the fever runs high. –Paul Simon In the book I’m reading the character Nana says, “All my life it took me two tries to get anything right. And all of a sudden I’m old.” But she wasn’t sad, because this made it all the sweeter.\u00a0 I feel that this […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1656","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pSTth-qI","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1656"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1658,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1656\/revisions\/1658"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/susansenator.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}