An Innocent Woman

I’m in Eastport, Maine. After spending less than 24 hours here, I told Thomas that this place is like the illegitimate love child of New Bedford and Harpswell, the latter being the quaint Maine fishing village we spent a week in this past summer. Eastport has a more rusty industrial feel to it and I’m curious to know it’s history. I’m working on that. Right now I’m watching scallopers troll the bay outside my window for today’s catch and it’s making me hungry. Something tells me pan-seared scallops are on the menu at some point this week. The co-host of the Airbnb is friends with one of the scallopers and she asked if I would like some fresh scallops if her friend drops by with some. Yes please!

I hesitated to tell anyone what I was doing over February break and I thought a lot about why that was. Was I ashamed? At first I thought it was that, I thought I was embarrassed to be jetting off 6 hours plus north just because I wanted to see what this place was all about. Then I realized it wasn’t so much shame but reluctance I felt. I didn’t want people to know I was coming here because I just didn’t have the answer to any of the questions I knew I’d be asked. Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? are all the questions that Mom threw at me when I told her what I was doing and I don’t really blame her. She’s a Mom, as am I. I get it. I’m her kid. But, I am her quiet/somewhat feral wild child and I can’t seem to shake that no matter how old I get. I’m sure I will pay for this through later experiences with my own children. Until then, I don’t have the answers to all those questions, not even at this very second, and I think that’s part of a writer’s life. We seek experiences in order to relay them but sometimes we’re not entirely sure what kind of experiences we seek until we essentially just sit down, plunk our finger onto a map, and choose an area that looks interesting with reasonably priced accommodations.

Maine has called me back a number of times over the years and it seems those visits always precede significant growth moments in my life. I have been in a solid parenting and caregiving mode for a very long time and I have recently gotten swallowed up by the weight of it all. I work well under pressure—as Meg says, pressure brings out the best in me. I firmly believe that my place in the order of things is exactly where I am—at home with my kids and parents and, of course, teaching. I am happy there, content. However, caregiver burnout is very real and somewhat dangerous. If you’re not careful, it can consume you like flames and before you know it, you’re a shell of who you used to be and, perhaps, a little “crazy”. Thus, I know exactly when I need to step away and take a million deep breaths. So, here I am on the border of Canada. Again.

In addition to all the things I am, I am also a writer. Writing is an itch I have to scratch and, to be honest, it has saved me in so many ways. My brain is always trying to make sense of my world through words. I don’t know why this is, it just is. Regardless, writing is very difficult to do with the sound of two TVs and the ever-present anticipation of something crisisy (pronounced crisis-ee) happening. Call it selfish if you must but I needed to get away from it all in order to process my thoughts and feelings and then put those into words. Perhaps being selfish, and a little weird, is not such a bad thing.

As for thoughts that I have been processing into words, I have been working on that for quite a while. I always circle back to how the fabric of my family was torn on the fateful night of my grandmother’s untimely death. As a writer, I have always felt somewhat responsible to understand and convey that past. Maybe I’m trying to mend the fabric a bit. Or, I just want this story to be heard. All I know is that I got a chance to live when Mom was 43. She had always lived with the dread that she was doomed to repeat her mother’s fate. Instead, she got pregnant again and now bears the nickname “tank” for just how much she can take and keep going.

Through all the chaos of the previous weeks, I had a strange moment when I was trying to write about my grandmother’s death in vivid detail. As part of that process, I closed my eyes after reading a news article about her accident that my sister had found through Ancestry.com. She did not die right away but stayed alive for a number of hours afterwards in the hospital. Suddenly, I could see my grandfather pacing back and forth next to her bed, running his fingers through his curly dirty blond hair, hands shakily wiping tears away. I heard my grandmother say “Make sure Mary gets her coat back.” before taking her last breath. I saw my grandfather talking to Aunt Margaret (his sister) and Uncle Neil about what had happened. Did they show up at the hospital? I don’t know. All of these things may not have happened but that does not take away from the fact that I saw this in my mind. I felt this loss not just from Mom’s perspective but now from my grandmother’s as well. She lost her life and family. Did she die worried about how they would ever survive in the unsteady hands of her husband?

My grandmother lost her children, her life, the chance to do right by them. She died knowing they were not in good hands, they would suffer. I see that trauma live on in all members of my family, even in my own children. Through writing, therapy, and unabashed honesty I have attempted to work our way out of that past in order to forge a brighter future. The truth is, there is no magic cure or spell to “fix” what has been done. My good friend Kai told me that he always tries to figure out how he can approach every situation and human with love no matter what. We aren’t always going to understand how or why things happened. We can, however, push through our defenses to find the softness at our core. That softness, that place that existed long before any of the hurt ever happened, is where we need to always return to. With any luck, and maybe a few pan-seared scallops, this trip will give me the strength to return to that core and move forward on this journey of loving and weaving my understanding of what all of this is about through adventures, deeds, and words. “An Innocent Man” by Billy Joel has been on repeat on my playlist for a while now and I finally figured out why after I savored my favorite line: “I’m not above going back to the start to find out where the heartache began.” All that’s left to do now is heal and move forward in peace and love. Thank you, Maine. And thank you, Billy.