Ellen Herrick

Author of The Sparrow Sisters

Safe as Houses

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I am lost.  It’s as if I am a sleepwalker woken up in another room.  Even the face of my waker is a stranger to me.  Nothing is where I left it; my books closed and unread, abandoned in piles at my bedside.  This Autumn, a season of such unexpected warmth and sunshine, has left me in darkness.  I am constantly cold.  Some days I leave my coat on until my daughter comes home from school. I tear it off and shove it into the closet when I hear her footstep at the front door.  I bake and I cook but I don’t eat.  While my family swirls in and out of this little house I am left standing at a center that I cannot hold.  But, I am trying, so very hard.  For the first time I am so separate from my children that sometimes I don’t even say goodnight to my daughter, embarrassed that at 8:30 I can’t keep my head up anymore.  She is in her room, chatting, working, singing Christmas carols in a high, sweet soprano, and I am in mine, a single lamp puddling light on a book that won’t be read. I am homesick and I can’t go home.

There is the before, and then there is the after: when I broke up with my high school boyfriend and fell in love with my husband, very nearly 33 years ago, when I had my first child, when my mother died over twenty years ago, when we moved to London, when we moved back.  These are all befores and afters that were, each in there own way, a rupture and a re-sealing. And, in the rupture there was a time of fear and unsteadinesss.  In the re-sealing a time of gathering in and then reaching out for a new kind of life.  There was a loss and then, somehow, a gift: something so entirely new and different that all you could do was open your arms wide and grab at it.  Now, my hands are fisted and cold, my arms constantly wrapped around me, my back bowed.

Look, this will pass, too.  This will be the space between the before and after.  I will figure out how to find my way again.  As my friend in London says “no one died.” And she can say that because her before and after frames deaths so wrenching that any after she has is so hard-won as to be positively heroic.  For me, no one died.  No one is ill.  No one is in terrible trouble, not really.  But here’s the thing, I cannot help longing for something that I have already had.  I’m lucky, you see.  I was once safe and whole and lived in a house that rang with laughter.   I know what it feels like to be absolutely certain (smug, perhaps) that, barring hell or high water, my life is rounded out by love and care.  After all, Cabana Boy was there to make sure we were settled in, safe as houses.  Sure, I miss the babies I once had (although my 23-year-old had to be collected in his pyjamas just this week to be taken to the doctor, so consumed with flu and fever I saw a tear stain his cheek), I watch the summers slide by too quickly, I remember the Christmases when Santa left his footprints in the flour scattered under the chimney.  These are all markers in a good and full life.  No, this time I miss me.  It is myself that has, I guess at least for now, moved out.  I will find that forwarding address and track myself down.  I will convince me that although things will never be as they were, (this is my after, after all), they will be OK, just different.

I have a friend who always tells me “It will all be OK in the end.  If it isn’t OK, it’s not the end.”  I am waiting for the end.

Joy Rising, Sorry Oprah

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I have a friend, one of those real ones that your kid brings over to you on the playground or in front of the school and says, “Here, this is so and so’s Mum, you’ll love her.”  There are other real ones, like the girl you met Freshman year in college who is so different from you and yet so alike that you can’t stop listening to her stories and you start using the same soap she does because you want to smell just like her.  But more about her, another time.

Anyway, I met this particular friend, as I said, at my son’s school.  She has what is called here a double-barreled surname.  But, in her case, it’s a quadruple-barreled surname.  You know, Eugenia Tibble-Spencer-Blatherington-Smythe, III.  I would tell you the actual name but then you’d think her veddy, veddy English and snooty, which she’s not.  Not. At. All.  Although, to be fair, her voice is elegant, her tones pear-shaped, her skin so like a rose you’d be forgiven for wanting to curtsy.  Never mind.  If you did wobble into one, she’d just tell you (in a voice that makes you want to stop talking, forever) “Oh, do get up, darling, you make me feel like a fucking idiot.”

This is a woman who wears a hat like nobody else, and an evening gown, and Wellington boots, and an apron that says “Keep Calm and Carry On,” probably all at the same time.  She is organized and efficient and completely incapable of letting anyone down.  She also radiates light in the most effortless, self-effacing way.  She would be extraordinary if that was her whole story.  But it is not.

This friend has endured tragedy on an unimaginable scale.  I won’t be more specific but try to imagine it anyway: think of the worst loss you can, and multiply it.  Then, throw on a wallop of more crap, and then, pitch yourself down a flight of stairs.  So, now that I’ve beaten you into a senseless depression, listen to this: She still radiates light.  She still makes me laugh so hard I blow tea out my nose.  What my friend does, and what has saved her, is this: She takes joy in other people’s joy.  She can dip her long, graceful fingers into their happiness and let it spill over her, into her.  Her joy in genuine, it is not forced or false.  It’s the real deal.  It becomes her, is her.  She’s like an empath that way.  And, as you see your happiness reflected in her, it only intensifies it for you and you can’t believe your great good fortune to have landed in her world.  She does all this without making you feel as small as the Who on Horton’s trunk.  She makes you feel clever and special and lovely for having a wonderful thing happen to you, because you so deserve it.

My dear friend has an expression when you thank her for something.  “Only a pleasure,” she says.  Or, if you’re terribly lucky, she graces you with “Pleazh, Treazh.”  Pleasure, Treasure.  But, really she’s  the treasure, and you’re the one blessed with the pleasure of her presence in your life.  And you think, just for a moment, that, yes, you do deserve it.