Tag Archives: Addison

Sitting in the Dark

It’s midnight and I can’t sleep. My heart is aching and feels squeezed inside a too-small space in my chest. I consider waking Addison up in case I really am having a heart attack this time. But I sigh, knowing this pain will not kill me. Not tonight.

I slip out of bed and creep across the floor, gathering up my writing materials and my laptop and bringing them out to the kitchen table. I put some broth on the stove to heat up while I write. 

The house has as an emptiness to it now, a strange, ghostly shell feeling. I open the door to what would have been Chickadee’s bedroom, to put something away in there. It smells like an empty room. Like no one has ever lived in there or ever will. Addison almost set up his office in there, but failed halfway through the process. Books, magazines and papers lie on the floor in mismatched piles. The plant stand is empty. I couldn’t bear to leave a plant in there all alone.

I write to two of my friends in Vermont, puzzling over my conundrum of how to get the support I need right now. I reflect on my realization of how rare and precious we few are–what priceless gems the people are who can truly listen, truly be present and available to our loved ones. Even though I meditate and breathe deeply and read books and go for walks and play music and cry… I feel rotten and festering inside. There is no replacement for a listening ear, no replacement for a friend who considers my suffering to be their own.

After writing and drinking a cup of broth, I wander into the living and lay on the couch. Going back to bed with Addison while he is sleeping peacefully is too hard. If I am alone than I want to be alone. And at least one of us should sleep. 

Chickadee had awakened me and led me to this very couch so many times during my pregnancy with her. I would awake as early as 2 am, with a hunger so fierce and undeniable I would be driven from my bed and sent waddling to the kitchen. I would find something to eat and make my way to the couch and Gurmukh’s book on pregnancy. I would read about being a pregnant mother, opening myself to my child, preparing for birth and preparing to have a baby.

Before Gurmukh’s book, I would read out loud to Chickadee from the Tibetan Book of the Dead. But after a month or two of this, I wondered if perhaps it was too morbid to be reading about death to my unborn baby. The Tibetan Buddhist monks don’t seem to be all that happy about being born. They seem to be devoting themselves wholeheartedly to their practice so that when they die, they don’t have to be reborn.

And at the same time, I had the feeling that Chickadee already knew all about birth and death and the realms beyond all of it. I imagined her smiling knowingly as I read to her.

Sometimes I would be awake around dawn, and birds would be coming to the feeder outside of the living room window. I would open the door and stand out there, being quiet and listening deeply when the chickadees were speaking, so my baby could hear them.

This morning I am on the same couch we had shared, in the same living room, at 2 am, but now I am alone. I think about Chickadee and wonder why I don’t feel like I can still talk to her, wonder if she’s still here with me. It is so silent, lying there in the dark, and I feel empty inside.

I wonder if this is how dark it was for her inside of my womb.

My mind drifts groggily, and as my eyes close I hear a sound. It’s a small sound, as though a moth wing has brushed against the strings of the viola that is hanging on the wall above me. Or perhaps the sound came from the guitar that hangs over the fireplace. I can’t tell. I hold still and listen. Silence.

As I begin to doze off again, I hear the faint sounding of an instrument’s string once more.

I don’t know why, but I feel afraid, so I get up and walk back to the bedroom.

I find Addison has scootched all the way to my side of the bed, as though he has been searching for me while I was gone, and had traveled in his sleep to the far side of our big bed, in hopes of finding me there. I stand over him, wondering how best to move him so I can lay back down.

“You’re up,” he says suddenly, and I clutch my chest in surprise. 

“You scared me,” I murmur.

He rolls over and gets up to pee. I crawl into the spot he’s opened up for me, all warm and damp from his overheated body. When he returns he puts his arms around me, and even though he’s a little too hot for me, I am soon fast asleep.

For a few precious hours I will be unconscious, and my pain will be a distant dream.

I will awake to more heartache. But I will make myself get out of bed, and I will go and sit on my cushion. I will practice looking deeply at the painful feelings in me, and I will smile to them, and I will breath in, and I will breath out.

This pain will not kill me. Not today.

Reflecting on Choices

It’s a gray, windy day here in Austin.

I’ve been brewing over the past, the future and wrestling the present moment into a bear hug, desperate to stay grounded.

I have been thinking about what happened in Playa del Carmen after I discovered I was pregnant.

We all make choices, and then we live with those choices.

What I experienced in Playa del Carmen after discovering I am pregnant, was a rollercoaster of emotions.

I found myself reflecting on the series of choices that led me to the moment where I was sitting on the beach in the dark with Addison, listening to the waves and watching their white crests glint against the moonlight.

I had chosen to leave Addison, and to ride my bicycle to Brazil.

I chose to ride from Austin, leaving Brazil for last.

I didn’t just go straight to Brazil, because I wanted to follow the line I had started when I left Vermont on a bicycle 3 years ago.

If I had known I would only be gone for 3 months, yes, I would have gone straight to Brazil.

But I didn’t know that.

When you tell your life partner that you’re leaving them for 6-9 months and you don’t know when you’ll be back, naturally they must make adjustments of their own.

The trajectory of our lives had been splitting apart, and this child seemed to have appeared to make us reconsider everything.

In a way, it should have been relieving.

Being pregnant would mean I could go home. It could mean I wouldn’t lose Addison.

And it could mean many many other things.

Those many other things washed over me as I sat in the sand with Addison.

What about capoeira?

What about our music careers?

What about making it all the way to Brazil?

What about the book I was going to write once I finished my 9 month journey?

I imagine many new parents experience these kinds feelings.

New life bringing a sense of death to their old life.

But never once have I heard a parent tell me that they regretted having kids.

I am so fascinated by old people. People who have been through all of this and more. People whose children are already grown, and whose grandchildren have already been born.

When I see an old lady, I stare at her, study her, think about what she might be thinking about, how it might be to be her.

Her hands are wrinkled and covered with blue veins and dots, her face is sagging and her hair is thin. But her eyes are the same color as when she was 16.

She has lived–far longer than I have–with her choices.

She had dreams too. She hoped for things.

When she was young, she imagined her life to look a certain way, imagined the great things she would accomplish.

She fell in love, she broke hearts, she had her heart broken.

Maybe she tried to become a concert pianist, but it was too hard. Maybe her parents couldn’t afford the lessons. Maybe she lost interest when she got older because than she wanted to be the lead singer of a rock band.

Maybe she wanted to travel around the world.

Maybe she wanted to be a school teacher.

A poet.

A dancer.

Most likely she wanted to be loved, respected, admired.

Maybe some of these things happened. Maybe none of them did. Maybe they happened in broken bits and pieces.

But by the time she is in her 70s or 80s, how much of it really matters to her anymore?

Or does it haunt her?

I hear Tom Waits’ voice drift through my head at this moment:

“What does it matter, a dream of love or a dream of lies?

We’re all gonna be in the same place when we die.

Your spirit don’t leave knowing

Your face or your name

The wind in your bones is all that remains.

And we’re all gonna be just dirt in the ground.”

dirt in the ground

 

Thanks for reading. Don’t want these posts to be too long, so I’m practicing keeping them a bit shorter. I have the next part mostly written and I’ll share it soon!

 

Nobody Wants to Die (what this song is ACTUALLY about ;)

This week I thought it would be fun to share the story around one of our most popular songs on the album, Nobody Wants to Die.

Nobody Wants to Die is the title track of our latest album, and set the tone for our album’s theme: death.

But when I think about what the song’s original roots are, I remember that the song arose into my consciousness from a very potent, and virile emotion: jealousy.

The way that I experience jealousy, at least these past 5 years or so, is pretty specific: I become extremely riled up, and talk about or imagine the offending party’s death at my hands.

I’m not proud of it, but the fact is it makes for good song-writing fodder. 🙂

So about three years ago, when I was afflicted with a case of such jealousy, I attempted to make Addison admit that he was madly in love with the offending party; but I could coerce no such confession from him.

As I sat down in front of the piano late that night, I decided that he wouldn’t outright lie to me, so in order for him to withhold the truth for me, he would first have to lie to HIMSELF.

So I sang:
“Well he lies to himself, so he can lie to me
Well he lies to himself, so I won’t really see.”

And I concluded that the reason he would decide to not admit to being madly in love with this other woman, was because he was afraid I might murder her if he did.

“Cause nobody wants to die, nobody wants to die
Well he tells me lies, ’cause nobody wants to die…no.”

And understandably, who really does want to die?

I did quote him in the song, when he tried to convince me against this jealous idea:

“‘Oh be reasonable, see this reason:
I want you more, I will always want you more’…”

But I concluded once again:

“He says this to me because…

Nobody wants to die, nobody wants to die
Well he tells me lies, ’cause nobody wants to die…no.”

Once I had completed the song and eventually performed it for Addison, it was pretty short, only 2 minutes at best.

Addison and I decided (once my jets had cooled a bit) that he should write his own part, and have the song be a conversation between the two of us.

He didn’t write what I expected him to, though his words were coming from a defensive place (understandably):

“How many times has she set her mind on some way she thinks things should be?
She tells me what she sees, and how she wants to meet me in her dreams.
So I accept what she suggests, ’cause I love her the best
But when those dreams turn into tests sometimes I got nothing left
Still I say ‘yes’ ’cause…”

And then he sings this part during the chorus:

“I don’t want to kill her love for me…
I would never lie, but I don’t want her love to die.”

So this song began as an unpleasant ordeal, but nowadays it has become a fun song to for us to play together, and I believe it will continue to be as the years roll on… 🙂

Click on the link below to listen to Nobody Wants to Die and/or purchase the song:
https://thelovesprockets.bandcamp.com/track/nobody-wants-to-die