Mercy, mercy, mercy
A TOTALLY FINE intermission
HONEY STAY SUPER is a reader-supported publication. This post is free for everyone, so you can share it wherever and however you want! When you upgrade to a paid subscription, you gain access to the full archive, previously unpublished work, and more intimate writing about marriage, divorce, non-monogamy, sex, and who knows what else!
I know. I owe you a Part 2 to the Part 1, but a couple things happened toward the end of last week that knocked me sideways. One personal. One professional. And although one was going to happen eventually and the other was ultimately a relief, they both left me reeling to a degree that surprised me. Adding to that, it’s now officially Stick Season here in Vermont, a time of blustery, gray, bleakness. It’s not the holidays yet, but they’re coming and I am not excited. And it’s no longer birthday season, which is (once again) my favorite. It all makes me want to curl up into a ball and perhaps not die but hibernate long enough for the world to leave me the fuck alone for 2 seconds.
The way I handled this sideways-knocking reminded me of a classic bit of footage from my last full-time job. It was taken on a shoot I wasn’t even on, over 15 years ago. The shoot was for [unnamed outdoor brand] and the [unnamed] account guy on the [unnamed outdoor brand] account took the [very expensive] camera to capture some footage for b-roll. The POV: looking down at his feet wearing [unnamed outdoor brand footwear] as he hopped across and through a river, rock to rock. You can probably guess what happened next.
He ate it.
If memory serves, he slips, there might’ve been an “oof”, the POV of the camera goes total spin cycle then maybe rests on its side? It was a long time ago, I don’t remember all the details. But it’s clear that someone out of frame and out of earshot must’ve said something like “holy shit are you ok??” because the first thing we hear from [unnamed account guy] is an urgent-sounding, “TOTALLY FINE, TOTALLY FINE.” It is the fucking funniest bit of footage that was probably ever captured for that client. This brief clip, with the perfect establishing shot, is honestly a pre-TikTok masterpiece. I want to see it again and I wish I could link to it.
I was reminded of this professional deep cut when I realized it was also a metaphor for how I’ve been coping with almost everything, not just over the past couple of years, but possibly across my entire life.
My desire to create order and establish control in the midst of disruption and hurt is immediate and automatic. I don’t know if this is a GenX thing, a midlife thing, a child-of-divorce thing, a mother thing, or if it’s just a human being thing. But it became glaring to me at the end of last week when I got double-whammied by life again that my immediate reaction was to scramble to minimize everything, that none of it was a big deal, that I was TOTALLY FINE.
Ask me how I knew I wasn’t totally fine! Hey man, I’m glad you asked. So I was sipping my emotional support maple latte at one of my favorite coffee places minutes after getting the second piece of bad news, texting with friends about it all, while I was also unshowered, unmoisturized, a goddamn mess inside and out, when I started to cry. In public. First a little and then a lot. And it wasn’t sobbing or like the kind of obvious crying where someone is like “wow, someone definitely died” and they actually feel sorry for you. It was the kind of unhinged silent plink-plink-plink of tears sliding down your face while you’re texting as if nothing is out of the ordinary and you occasionally laugh at what your friends text you back but then you go right back to crying the next second and sipping your latte as if you don’t look like a total lunatic and as if it’s all very TOTALLY FINE, TOTALLY FINE.
The thing is, I do know I’ll be fine. Well, I technically don’t know. I mean, I think I will? I’m not sure how much more I can pep talk my way through 2023 but I swear to god I will not let this stupid year win. Anyway, my point is that it’d be damn near impossible and not nearly as enjoyable to finish writing that Part 2 (about turning 55) in my current state of mind. But I will return to it very soon.
In the meantime, I will give you a window into this bad stretch of days and what I did because it was another lesson in taking care of myself and resiliency and if you think I’m getting tired of taking care of myself and building resiliency the answer is HAHAHAHA YES INDEEDY.
Before the bad things happened, I was feeling deeply overwhelmed by Life Admin. I just completed the most major move of my life yet almost two months later I still haven’t really started changing my address across the probably one thousand accounts that need changing. And hey everybody, FYI, the United States Postal Service no longer lets you just change your address online so that garbage could just be forwarded to you in the meantime. Oh no, it’s like going to the DMV now. And, when it comes to changing the mailing address for your kids? Your kid has to have a photo ID or a piece of mail in their name at the old address and their new address or some such shit. I have had a USPS employee literally tell me that these teenagers should just tell everyone who has their mailing address about their new mailing address, like that is the only possible option. Are we in pioneer times? Should I start monitoring the horizon for a covered wagon full of Bed Bath and Beyond closeout sale coupons too? This same useless man then said to me, “well what mail could anyone under 18 even have?” and I swear to fucking god. Why is life so thoroughly and deeply dumb these days.
Life Admin also includes all the appointments and all the deferred maintenance on me, a dog, two teenagers, two cars, and my finances from the past year. Plus two kids applying to college at the same time. Throw a couple of gap years in there too while you’re at it. Then there’s the Life Admin around a divorce, the separation of accounts, the changing of beneficiaries. I need to change health insurance policies. I’m getting a new accountant. I’m getting a financial advisor because I’m a proven moron. I still haven’t gone through my archived email inbox from March (?) May (?) when my MacBook fried. Haha! Ha! I STILL HAVE NOT FULLY UNPACKED. My ground floor is packed with boxes. I’m renting two storage spaces and I do not want two storage spaces. Life Admin doesn’t even include the regular shit, the menu planning and cooking, the bill paying, the laundry and cleaning. Life Admin is a job I did not apply for, am not being paid for, and do not want.
I thought I’d have all weekend free to start finally chipping away at that, to you know really buckle down as the Dads used to say. Really take the bull by the horns, etc. But for reasons too unnecessary to get into here, I ended up doing exactly none of that and instead drove my daughter and our French exchange student to Montreal for the day on Saturday. I have lived in Vermont for 21 years as of next January and Montreal has represented nothing but a total pain in the ass to me from the time I arrived here. I’ve been here long enough that I’ve gone through several evolutions of navigating my way to Montreal and back: printed Mapquest directions, GPS that took you only to the US/Canada border then wished you Au revoir, bonne chance all the way to Montreal, and now finally a complete end-to-end voice navigation praise Jesus.
But those early days of navigating have stuck with me as an internalized story that Montreal is hard and confusing. Sometimes I would get lost both going and coming back. When we first moved here, my then-husband and a friend got so lost on their way to a concert in Montreal that by the time they pulled into a gas station to ask directions, barely able to bridge the language barrier, they showed their map to the the woman working there and she began to laugh, telling them that where they were now wasn’t even on their map.
The first time I successfully navigated my way up and back, I called him as soon as I crossed back into the United States to share that I had broken the curse but the reception was so bad that he thought I had said that I had broken the car and I was like I wouldn’t say that because that’s not how adults speak. This was all a while ago now, probably ten years or more, but still this story of hellish difficulty remained. Montreal would never be easy, it would always be stressful, and I would never understand why people from here loved going up there (it’s the closest major city, that’s why, ding dong.)
Being forced into going this past Saturday opened my eyes to how easy the trip actually is. The drive doesn’t take that long. But most of all I needed that trip. I needed to get out of my apartment and off the couch and away from screens. What I needed most of all was to stop feeling sorry for myself and instead sacrifice my one wild and precious Saturday of Life Admin to two teenage girls. A noble and worthy cause.
We lucked out with an absolutely gorgeous day while we walked around the cobblestone streets of Old Montreal, dodging tourist traps, taking lots of photos, and discovering a brunch spot where we were only able to get a table because a reservation, also for a table of 3, hadn’t showed. We were so hungry and the food was so good. You know that feeling? Like everything is working out? Like the moment is just perfect and you sigh without realizing it as you gaze around. Sometimes it takes so little. Sometimes it takes just being able to order three beverages simultaneously, guilt-free, because different place, different rules. And then when they bring the champagne and orange juice separately for the mimosa you get to have a conversation like (French exchange student): “I’ve never seen this drink before?” (me): “I’ve never seen the ingredients delivered separately before!”
The following day, we had all agreed, was a reset day. Senior year runs everyone ragged. Exchange programs run their students ragged. And my life is running me ragged as hell. Our Sunday was wide open, not a single obligation all day. I woke up and took the dog for a long walk. I was supposed to do Life Admin again and I just didn’t have it in me. Again. Save that shit for Monday, a historically bad day anyway, I thought.
I decided to put up some art. I had spent all of those years in our house having art custom framed. Do you know how expensive it is to have art custom framed? Expensive. But I thought that’s what I should do, in that big permanent home. I needed to make the art permanent too. I kept some of that art but it’s now in storage. I sold some of the art, at a complete loss. And some I just gave away.
When I had all of that expensively framed art, I was also married to a man who tolerated hanging art the exact way I wanted it hung—with precision, in exact arrangements, using a stud finder and a level and let met tell you, those days are over in more ways than one.
The other day I swung a hammer for the first time in like 20 years and it wasn’t pretty but it got the job done. I will not be hanging anything in a complex, precise arrangement again any time soon. I will also not be getting anything custom framed again any time soon either. I am back to the renters life now, after twenty years as a homeowner. And I have to remind myself that I can’t just do whatever I want to the walls. So I rubbed down the walls with alcohol and applied non-damaging sticky bits to posters and prints. When I eventually take all of that art down, when it’s time to move yet again, more than half of it will probably end up in the recycling.
The art I had set aside to put up is a mix of original prints from a designer friend (a friend who is a designer, not a new product line of friends), a thrifted Paris poster, pages ripped from magazines from different decades, and color copies of textiles and quilts. Vintage wallpaper samples and found photographs. A spread from the New York Herald Tribune from March 6, 1932. Another wall is covered with portraits and sketches from a student portfolio that was abandoned in the corn crib next to the farmhouse we rented when we first moved to Vermont. I had carted the artist’s work around for twenty years, trying to find her once every few years.
I actually did end up finding her, during the pandemic. I will share more about that experience eventually, but for now: A couple of years ago I showed her her artwork, one by one, holding each piece up to the camera as she narrowed her eyes to see. We’re around the same age. She hadn’t seen any of this art since she was in her twenties. There was very little she wanted, and whatever I didn’t ship to her she told me I could just throw away. But I couldn’t, not all of it anyway. Why am I trying to save art the artist doesn’t even want, I thought at the time. Now I know. Because it deserves to be saved. What we make deserves to be seen by someone else, in a fresh light. We deserve to be seen by someone else in a fresh light, too. And we all deserve to be saved.
At one point late Sunday morning, the sun was lasering directly into my living room, the houseplants basking. I was working on my second wall of art. The dog was snoozing and also basking. My daughter was reading and my temporarily adopted French daughter was working in her sketch book. Music played. It was a sense of internal calm I hadn’t felt in a while, and certainly not in the previous few days. I took in the scene, and the feeling of the scene, and thought why can’t life be like this. And then, I realized, life is like this. Right now it is like this.
And then I thought: Just make a home. Just make your temporary place in the world. And although there is so much more to do, there is always so much more to do, I decided to just take this piece of it, this peace of it, and feel ok inside of it.
While I was hanging that art I was listening to a Spotify-generated jazz playlist. This song came on and the spoken intro stopped me dead, mid-hang. I stood on my janky little step stool and whispered to myself are you kidding me? So if you need it, here you go. Some mercy, mercy, mercy.
You can find my books here. You can find more of my writing here. You can’t find my brand work right now, my site is still down :( but it’ll relaunch in January! You can also follow me on Instagram, although I’m taking a break from it until after the holidays.
This was so fabulous. I left my marriage in my late 50s nine years ago, with a newly diagnosed chronically ill teen in tow, and let me just say that you NAILED the description of the Life Admin thing.
Loved this so much! Thank you for writing and sharing the beautiful art and song!