Survivor

Sometimes I feel a certain energy in my neck.  Maybe it's a bad day hanging out in there, maybe it's PMS, maybe it's rage.  Whatever it is it's like a collar of energy creeping up from my chest and cuffing my whole neck finishing off in a hard knot just under my skull.   I am coming to recognize it as my sense of survival.

I feel this sense for varied reasons, like when I make a clever joke and someone repeats it and then explains it back to me.   Me.  The originator of all that cleverness.  I feel it after a three-day weekend of the house being messy and smelling like dog pee and it was all good until suddenly it wasn't.   I feel it right before I'm about to start acting like my mother.

How I used to judge my mother.   She would come home from work and by 5:37pm was banging and throwing every pot we owned around the kitchen.  By 5:48pm she was smoking a cigarette on the back porch.  We all knew to just stay away.  But I judged her.  And I was afraid of her.  I didn't always feel comfortable talking to her.   My mother, the immigrant who fled her country as the Russians rolled tanks into her city square, has an outsized sense of survival.

I am my most productive when I feel my sense of survival.  I write.  I fold.  I stay up all night and watch movies.  It's all good until I have to explain myself or am interrupted.  Dinner.  Homework. Bed times.  Laundry for business trips.    That's when I feel like that hard knot at the base of my skull is nothing but a spot for a fetter.  And that's when the pots start banging.  But this time it's me banging the pots, not my mother.  And actually,  I am not a pot banger.  I am a fight picker.  A fight picker who blames to be more precise.  I have realized nothing really prevents this.  Wine postpones it.  Yoga suspends it.  Picking a fight gives it satisfaction and life.

Sometimes, if I am lucky, I can catch myself in the middle of all my surviving and apologize.  It's easier to apologize to the kids.  Their frowns turn right upside down.   I hope they remember the apology and not that I just continued making dinner and stopped demanding that they put the couch cushions back together.   My husband doesn't always let me apologize.  He says he doesn't need it.  I find this infuriating.

I love my strength.  I love my sometimes manic and, for the most part, impractical energy.  I love that I think writing this is more useful and productive than ever learning how to fold a fitted sheet.  But, by some definitions, surviving means you end up alone.  You win.  You are untouchable.  You don't get interrupted anymore.  I have a husband who doesn't always know how to listen to me.  Three children who may not always know how to talk to me.  Maybe they won't always know how to love me either.  I might disappoint them or maybe someday they might disappoint me, but one thing I do know is that without them I would be a survivor of nothing.