Just go back to bed, please. Tales from the Whatabitch tribe.

My plea to the husband on Sunday morning. I was at the bottom of the stairs looking up at him at the top of the stairs, begging him to go back to bed.

Stress, weather, lack of sleep, it takes a toll, sometimes the morning just feels like a continuation of the day before. It is these times of being overtired when the inability of the husband to read my mind and stay current with the unspoken changes that rapidly occur in my brain that can really derail the “to do” list. The early morning had disintegrated into snapping and snarling.

Doug had retreated to his office upstairs, and I can’t blame him. Who would want to stay downstairs with the queen of the Whatabitch tribe slapping soup bones on baking pans and wielding a sharp knife?  I stopped what I was doing, I didn’t want to be so tension filled while preparing food. I am a firm believer that our emotions are apparent in whatever we do or make, whether it be singing, playing an instrument, film making, baking, we imprint whatever we craft with ourselves at that moment. If a person is peaceful, it comes through in what they create, laundry, woodworking, soup stock, it doesn’t matter, we breathe ourselves into what we touch.

I slid the baking trays into the oven and was reminded of something I said to Doug after we had learned of Justin’s death.  We were taking the clothes we had picked out for Justin’s burial to the funeral home. I remember telling him that I never wanted to fight ever again.  We are not great fighters, nothing loud or dramatic, we snip, we snap, then we go get Chinese food. But at that moment, I never wanted to ever have any conflict or hurt again. The moment of clarity that comes from handing over a bag of clothes to the funeral director for your child to wear and knowing just down the hall is your child, you realize the colossal waste of time and energy on things that simply don’t matter. The vapidness of those things that seemed important become startling clear.  As the weight of grief and pain descend, veils are drawn aside. Truly an apocalyptic moment.

I set the timer, wiping my eyes on anything I lay hold of, make fresh coffee and prepare to beg Doug to go back to bed. I call up the stairs and ask if I can speak to him for a moment. He comes to the top of the stairs. “Go back to bed, please, just go back to bed for two seconds, get up and come downstairs, please.”  He peeks in the bedroom, “I can’t go back to bed, the cats are all in bed,” he replies. “Just step in the bedroom then, and come back out and come downstairs, lets just start today over. I will say good morning, you will say good morning, and I promise I will not wonder what you meant when you said good morning, please.”

He did, we said good morning, drank coffee at the table, ate oatmeal, and sketched out a plan for the day. There is an entire new language to be learned. You can’t ask each other “what’s wrong”, you do – then you realize what a stupid question.  You stumble and try to rephrase it, “is there something bothering you other than Justin being dead, you know, what is on your mind?” That doesn’t work either, your voice cracks on your child’s name and you just said out loud that your child is dead – what else could possibly be on your mind? What else could possibly be “bothering” you? It is hard, hard to rethink and ask the right questions.  Hard to to see the broken places and not know how to reinforce them. All new, this is all still new.

The winter is hard, short days, long work hours, leave in the dark, home in the dark, cold. The natural things that lend an ease to our day are in short supply, sunshine, daylight, warmth, a great deficit is created. We become tasked with creating small oases in this winter of our lives, spots of warmth, little sanctuaries of peace to carry us through to warmer winds.

Like starting the day over, sometimes all it takes is to go back to bed.