Sand in My Eyes (5 page)

But as I watched her now through my kitchen window, pulling weeds from the base of the birdbath, I felt a tugging from within me, a craving to write. Seeing someone passionately at play did this to me—made me wish I had an ounce of time to myself, to pursue a passion of my own! But no one had told me it could be so hard, that motherhood would give me indescribable joy in exchange for who I was as an individual, and that the accumulation of it all, of worrying, caring for my children, responding to their every whimper, oh, and all the housework and grocery shopping, the cooking and cleaning, would turn me into this woman who has no time for waving or smiling or getting to know neighbors, and certainly no time for writing!

I had always wanted to write, but life got in the way. The jobs I had at bookstores intimidated me, while my stint at the library overwhelmed me, and my work as a publicist for a publishing house, with all those doggone
authors, exhausted me to the point of hardly being able to write a word of my own. And when I did, writing through my lunchtime, I struggled with the way an English literature major like myself critically examines and hates every sentence she constructs, how she can hardly write a paragraph, and this results in all those unfinished stories, haunting the drawers of her desk.

And back to life under the domestic big top, I thought as I turned from the window to find the boys climbing around the stovetop like daredevils, reaching into the candy cabinet, leaving me no time for selfish pursuits.

“Boys,” I shouted. “You could have been burned! Had mommy been cooking, had the stove been on, you could have been burned.”

“Mama don’t cook,” said Will. “She microwaves.”

“True,” I said, “but I was about to fry an egg.”

They were hungry. I hadn’t fed them a cooked meal in two days. I put Marjorie down, helped the boys off the stove, and grabbed a piece of scratch paper, then rummaged through my drawer for a pen, wondering how I might go about getting us all dressed and out the door to the pediatrician’s, let alone the store, and when all I could find was a crayon, I scribbled, “to market, to market to buy a new … “Oh, what did I need from the store: a crispier, more colorful life; a fresher brain; a more lean-body; easier-to-care-for children; a healthier husband; a larger house?

“There once lived a woman,” I wrote in crayon on the scratch paper, “who lived in a little house on stilts.” But then Marjorie let out a shriek, and when I looked up she was standing on the center of the kitchen table. I flew through the air like a flying trapeze, hurrying to catch her before she fell, but once in my arms all she did was paw at my face like a hungry bear.

“No hit Mommy,” I told her as I put her safely to the ground, trying not to give her kicking, screaming act the attention it wanted, and when her tiny body came rolling my way, I hopped over it. Someone was calling me from the bathroom, in need of a wipe, while the other had broken the button on the water cooler, which was flooding the floor. I spun like a top, trying to recall what I was doing in the kitchen in the first place, tired of starting, stopping, and restarting tasks, phone conversations, and thoughts,
all of which lately had become like race cars taking off, hundreds a minute, only to be sidetracked or rammed into, and none of what I attempted was making it to the finish line.

All I wanted was to finish an act from start to finish without interruption, so I set the egg I wanted to fry on the counter and steadily walked to the sink, trying hard to block out the noise hitting me from every direction. To an ordinary person, washing a pan is simple. But for a mother, who is also like a ringmaster in a three-ring circus, doing dishes is more hair-raisingly difficult than swallowing fire.

And then I spotted Marjorie, from the corner of my eye, dumping something all over the floor—my jar of dried basil; red pepper, too. I could hear Thomas screaming at the top of his lungs. I think he fell down and bumped his crown. “No, no,” I told Marjorie, who had abandoned the spices and was now lying on her tummy in the puddle of spilled water, sipping it like a cat. She shook her head back at me, her nose up in the air, and I pulled out plastic bowls with mismatched lids, hoping they might lure her away.

“You can do it,” I chanted under my breath, trying hard to be the little engine that could. “You can make it through this day.” At least I thought I could, thought I could, thought I could. There was nothing I wanted more this very moment than to become an escape artist and disappear, but then I saw from the corner of my eye the egg I was going to make for my children’s breakfast, the only egg in the house, the extra large one sitting on the counter, roll to the edge and take a great fall. I dropped to my knees, trying to save old Humpty, but hard as I might, he slipped through my fingers.

It was the broken egg that made me cry, made me drop to my knees, nose to the ground, buttocks in the air. Had I been in a better state of mind I could have turned it into a yoga pose, but I was in a tizzy, breathing too fast, and when I rested my cheek on the floor, the only positive thing I could think was that at least egg whites were good for my skin—the closest thing I’d had to a facial in years!

“Why is Mama sad?” my son asked, parking himself beside me.

“Mamas can’t always be smiling,” I told him. “It wouldn’t be natural.”

“Why is Mommy stopped?” my other son asked.

Pulling my face from the floor, I looked at their little-boy faces, wondering how I should answer, whether I should tell them that a mother never stops, even when it looks like she has stopped. When it looks like she is resting, she is not. “I’m idling,” I said, “simply idling.”

“Why is Mama crying?” they continued, and I wanted to explain that when a mommy goes long enough without routine maintenance, or ignores all her problems, that then she begins to cry and shake. But they were too young for that, or to understand that their mother had expectations for happiness and believed marriage, career, a house, and children would be her driving fuel, not her exhaust.

CHAPTER SIX

ARE
you
ALL RIGHT
?” Timothy asked when he got to the kitchen and found me sitting on the filthy floor, my head now on my knees, the boys still beside me and Marjorie lying on her tummy nearby.

“It’s what happens,” I told him, “when a woman pulls too heavy a load.”
Up hills and down hills
. “Without fixing her weak spots. She tries making it farther.”
She thinks she can, she can, she can
. “But then she stalls, then she breaks down.”

“You’re scaring me,” he said, towering over me.

I looked up with resentful eyes at his freshly showered, damp hair, stainless starched business shirt, pressed pants, and his big, white teeth, the ones he religiously flossed morning and night, not knowing how to get my feelings across, to say that I didn’t have time for any of that, for ironing my clothes, flossing my teeth, or swishing around mouthwash like him.

“Anna,” he said, “I need to know, are you okay?”

“I try,” I cried, wanting to tell him that all I needed was a simple “timeout”—thirty-six minutes to myself with my nose to the wall during which no one was allowed to look at or talk to me. “I try and try, but I can’t.”

“Can’t what?”

“Put it together again,” I told him.

“Put what together again?”

“This house—it’s a mess,” I said, unable to articulate it further. My
daughter was whining, the boys were bickering, and the ponytail in my hair, pulled too tight, was giving me a headache. All of it mixed together made my thoughts scatter and my words run off, and I was unable to tell where to find them. “Leave them alone and they’ll come home,” I read from the book Marjorie put up to my face. “And bring their tails behind them.”

“Anna,” Timothy said, squatting down beside me, his hand touching my face. “You’ve got egg on your face.”

“So?” I said nonchalantly.

“I’m worried about you—terrified to leave you like this, to leave the children alone with you.”

“Oh, shush, I’m fine,” I said, wanting to tell him that no, I wasn’t fine, that I might never be fine again, that since his betrayal I hadn’t been thinking clearly. It’s why I walked out on my job in New York City, then sold our house in Connecticut and moved us all down south into this birdhouse. And why, since arriving here, I had been finding it harder than I imagined, and less glamorous, staying home with my children 24-7. No breaks or time to myself, no energy left at the end of the day to clean the disastrous house, let alone write, and writing was the one thing I had hoped to start as a stay-at-home mother, thinking it would be a cinch, no longer dulled from the creative pressures at work.

“Give me your hand,” Timothy said. “Let’s get you up.”

“I don’t want your hand,” I told him, feeling like that person in a circus who sets up the tent, makes the costumes, trains the talent, pops the popcorn, sweeps the floor, and steps out into the arena to perform an act of her own. She tries to have fun but down she goes, and only for a second do they care about the clown with the painted-on sad face lying on the floor. Then the spotlight moves to daddy—the talented, funny juggler—with the daughter dancing on his toes and the twins swinging from his hands.

As I sat on the sticky floor, listening to the laughter of my family around me, I knew I hadn’t been feeling like myself. Him cheating on me, together with my new onset of tension headaches, children sick weekly, appliances breaking down one after the other—first the washing machine,
then the dryer, then the garbage disposal —palmetto bugs running across my bathroom floor each night, and the pale patches of ghost ants moving about the dark wooden pantry shelves, sprinting erratically when disturbed; all these pest-like frustrations had me feeling less like the happy-go-lucky woman I once was and more like one of those Mother Goose characters, the ones I read about to my children all the while thinking to myself how certifiably “off” they seem in today’s world.

“Let me help you wipe this egg mess up,” Timothy said when the children deserted us and ran to the other room.

“Just go,” I told him, batting away the wet rag in his hand. “Get yourself to the airport!”

“Unfortunately, I have to, or I’ll lose my job and we won’t be able to pay our rent,” he said, glancing at his watch. “But I’m calling my mother.”

“Your mother?”

“We’ve been here how many months now, and she hasn’t seen us.”

“I’m still getting settled.”

“She’s dying to see the kids. And starting to feel bad—every time they want to make the drive out here we tell them it’s not a good time.”

“This is definitely not a good time,” I said. “Look at our house. It’s a mess!”

“Our house is always a mess. And you need help. I’ll have her come and stay with you.”

“Stay with me?”

“She’d love to.”

“I’m sure she would, but I don’t want help,” I said. I didn’t want anyone knowing how bad our marriage was. Pride had me wanting to hide the imperfections of my life. And what would she think if she saw my house?

He looked to be in serious thought, and then said, “I’ll have her and Dad come take the kids.”

“Take my kids?”

“For a week.”

“A week?” I gasped. “I could see a few hours, or an afternoon, but a week?”

“You need it,” he said. “A week to yourself.”

“That’s ridiculous,” I told him.

“What’s ridiculous is your behavior!” he said, “And the fact that you can’t get your act together.”

I wanted then to tell him about the struggles I was having, tell him that when a woman becomes a mother she loses a part of herself, that the job of mothering is more encompassing than anyone could imagine and after so long with every intention, ounce of energy, and action going toward my children I would no longer know how to think or what to do should my children be taken away for a week. “What would I do with a week to myself?”

“For starters, you could clean this place up.”

I looked at him bitterly. “Why would I want a week to myself if all I’m going to do with it is clean, especially knowing it would only get trashed again twenty minutes after the kids come home?”

“When did you become so unhappy?” he asked.

“When you did what you did with that other woman,” I said, turning my long face from him and the sulfur I smelled coming from his breath. “You are, after all, the one who turned me into the person that I am.”

“You were miserable before that,” he said. “I think this is a case of what came first, the chicken or the egg.” But then he squatted down eye level with me and, when his eyes met mine, I knew he was thinking how lucky he was that I hadn’t walked on him, taking the kids with me. “Anna,” he said, softening. “I’ve fallen onto my knees a hundred times, begging for forgiveness.”

I put my nose in the air, and he saw the merciless look in my eyes that told him I could never be the same again, that the woman he had married was permanently ruined.

“I do have to go,” he said, “but you’ve got to figure something out, decide whether you can forgive me or not. I can’t go on like this. We can’t go on like this. It’s not good for the kids to see you like this.”