And Away We Go

It was a Friday. My husband and I headed out to the big city of Spartanburg, SC, for a night on the town. The plan was to have a drink and then have sushi for dinner, but apparently I was due for a melt-down, so that’s what we did instead.

It was all going fine--he had a beer, I had a glass of wine, and we were sitting there talking about the farm bill and the gutting of food stamps from it and the billionaires who get money from it in subsidies…. Well, I was talking about that, anyway, and getting a bit riled up in the process.

And then, as I had just made some brilliant and salient point, he said something along the lines of, “We need to stop talking about this--we can’t fix it, and we just get mad.” To which I responded that I’m never allowed to voice my opinions, and he said that’s not fair, which it wasn’t, and I said, “Well, I suppose I should have just been happy I was allowed to talk that long.”

Well. There went our nice sushi dinner, because neither one of us is the type to intentionally spend money on a nice dinner that’s going to be eaten in stony silence.

As we were walking to the car, I forced us to have a conversation about what it was I was upset about--because it wasn’t the farm bill--and I started crying.

Now, let me just say--I know all about the stereotype of women using tears to get their way, but I am not one of those women. Because Oprah? She didn’t invent the ugly cry. I was born ugly crying, and I am not even joking.

There is a family story about this. My grandparents, standing at the window of the hospital nursery waiting to be shown their little angel granddaughter, noticed a baby whose face was red and contorted with crying, and my grandmother said, “Oh my goodness, look at that poor child. Something must be wrong with it!” And then a nurse came in and picked up the ugly-crying baby, which relieved my grandmother greatly, because the poor child was clearly in some kind of apoplectic distress--but then, as you have surely guessed by now, the nurse brought the baby to the window and held me up for my grandparents to see. They checked my wrist to be sure, and yes, it said “Lednum girl.”

I spent my teens and twenties hardly ever crying--and when I did, trying to be sure I wasn’t seen. There was a lot of crying in the latter part of my thirties, but now that I’m in the later half of my forties, there’s almost no predicting what might bring it on.

That “conventional wisdom” about women of a certain age not having long hair? Not for me--I’m keeping it long until I’m past menopause and the crying is over. If you can plan it just right, you can be to the side of the person you’re with and let your hair fall down like a curtain to hide your blotchy, contorted face. Or you can hope it’s dark and you can’t be seen.

The last time I had a meltdown like this one, I didn’t have the advantage of darkness or having my husband next to me--I was folding laundry in our brightly lit bedroom and he was across the bed from me, and I could see the horror in his face: Good God, I married an attractive woman--what has happened to her?

Anyway, this time I had the falling darkness on my side in addition to having my husband next to, and not across from me. But that doesn’t help with the incoherent babbling that also goes along with my crying.

The substance of my meltdown was that it’s hard for me to be in the house by myself so much and how hard it’s been coming to a new town where I didn’t know anyone and I haven’t made any really deep connections, and so I rely on him for too much and I know it’s not really fair to do that.

But it came out sounding like this: “I have STUFF! In my head! And you don’t even KNOW! And I want you to know! But you don’t even want to hear it!”

In fairness, that’s not even true. There is a lot of stuff that I don’t ever want him or anyone else to know. And he really has no idea how much is there that he doesn’t want to know.

My dear husband listened and said sweet things and soothed and smoothed my hair (but not away from my face). And then he said this: “What you need to do is write a blog.”

So. Here I am, writing a blog. I have no idea if anyone will have any interest in what I have to say about the stuff in my head, but maybe it will be good therapy, and maybe I can say some things that will connect to someone else.

And honey, if stuff comes out of my head that you’re not entirely comfortable with, remember: You told me to.