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There is a distinctly cyclical nature to my days these days.  I am a creature of routine, if not habit, and while I welcome the safety that comes with the “set list” of my life, I find myself saddened by the turn it has taken.  Oh sure, there is the natural line that stretches from my own school days to those of my children, and now to the swift shift my oldest takes as he prepares to graduate from college and go to work (read, find a damn job).  Of the three, he is the least likely, in temperament, to return home; he couldn’t wait to shake the Mom dust from his heels.  And Thing Two?  He has surprised me with his eagerness to find his own way, perhaps because he has always seemed so, oh I don’t know, cozy.  As for Emma, I can practically hear the sproing as she grows up and away.  And this is all fine.

What is making me a melancholy baby is the ‘ye olde circle of life’ thing that I see and feel as I watch my father recover–and recover he will–from hip replacement surgery.  It’s not so much that Dad is approaching the end of his life because, if you use his five older sisters as a yardstick, he has another ten years ahead.  Of course, if you use his three brothers, he should have checked out twenty years ago.  He is now 86 so you do the math and imagine the next ten years–seriously, imagine them!

The brown, scratchy blanket that rests heavy on my shoulders is all about the stuff I can’t grab back.  It would seem that melancholy should be gray but gray is too soft, too pretty.  This feeling has a sharp edge, a pain that is akin to a toothache, the twang as you feel about in your memories just as you would poke your tongue–obsessively if you’re like me–into the sore tooth.   It has the faint scent of decay and that makes me shiver.  And, it’s not just that I can’t “recover” my father, the one who hoisted me on his shoulders and took me into the ocean waves for the first time (even as I screamed “No Daddy, please Daddy!).  Nor is it that I won’t get back the small, wriggly kids I dragged into that same water (they screamed, too, I’d like to think in delight but…).

It’s really that I can’t get myself back, not the me who still believed that everything would be OK, the one who really never expected she’d be one of those people, holding the big bag of hard stuff.

Here, I know what you’re thinking: this is, indeed, how life progresses.  And you’d be right.  Even more, I am lucky to have David who above all things prides himself on making us safe.  Plus, I have a sister who is holding the bag with me, as well as a whole ‘nother bag of hard stuff unique to her life.  It’s just that when I sit at Daddy’s horrible, paper-piled desk trying to find an insurance document, or when I stand at Emma’s window, folding laundry (again), or as I stir the 5,000th pot of pasta sauce, or try to reason with a call center employee in far away India (calming breath) I just want to say, “Can someone else do this for a bit?”  It’s not a new feeling for me.  I remember being in labor with Thing One and saying to the obstetrician “Could I just take a little break here?”  But, there is no break, not then and certainly not now.  All I really want to do is scrawl “Pls Handle” across the Medicare claim form, the long term insurance letter, the school trip permission slip, grocery list, dry cleaning ticket, ad infinitum, and throw it in an outbox.  Except, I am the outbox.

Anyway, back from Digresslandia (where I am monarch and have myriad helpers who rush to handle all things unpleasant), I have found this cyclical nature of everything in my life slightly soul-destroying.  The fact that I have spent so much time on Amtrak trains and Bonanza buses that I now know every clean bathroom between Boston and New York (including that the center sink in South Station doesn’t work and if you stand up too fast in the last toilet in Penn Station (upper level) it flushes all up the back of your jeans), makes me feel utterly deflated.  I mean it was one thing to scope out all the rest rooms in all the museums of the world, it’s entirely another to be caught, pants down (as the sliding door you’re sure you locked whizzes open), in the handicap bathroom next to the cafe car on the Acela Express. (Which is not the train in the picture. That is a Wimbledon local, another train on which I have spent time, as it turns out.)

Look, my point (now so blunt you could use it as a crayon) is this:  I feel as if the circle of life I was meant to be dancing around has kind of slewed me off track.  I can see my family high stepping around the ritual fire, full of joy and, no doubt some kind of ceremonial liquid.  But, I can’t get to them right now.  I am at the edges of this dance, one foot in New York and one in Cambridge, heart pulled painfully between the two.  And let me tell you, it is really hard to dance like that.

So, for now, I am going to hang up the toe shoes.  I’m going to walk carefully between my two worlds, in sensible Chucks, watchful that I don’t stray too far from either because, in truth–and no matter how dizzy I am feeling as I run between them–I am needed in both, I am loved in both and I belong in both.  But, Damn it Janet, I am too young and beautiful for this!  Or not.