HOW DID I GET HERE?
BRIT WASHBURN, (PART I)
Sisyphus in Love
August 2021
Recently, a friend of mine saw his only son off to college, as many of my friends have done in recent weeks & months & years. We are around that age. I asked him how he was doing, what the experience had been like for him, and he told me of the dinner he and his wife had had afterward, the drinks they had ordered, the lovely food, their sighs of relief.
And I felt envious—of the sighs, certainly, having felt no such relief when my own two oldest children left home, knowing that they were far from in the clear, if ever they would be. Of the meal, which sounded expensive and refined. But, most of all, of the marriage, of having a spouse with whom to share the experience, their shared history which, I can only assume, isn’t just history, but an extension of their life together in the present, their life to come.
I have what amount to good relationships with the fathers of my children. Just last Friday night, when I was in town to visit my ailing mother, my former husband (the father of my first three children, whom I was with for fifteen years and from whom I have been separated 11), had me over for dinner with my little girl, whose father he isn’t. He still lives in the house we bought together 16 years ago, in which our kids were little and ran feral in the pluff mud on the marsh out back. I brought a bottle of vinho verde; he made saffron risotto with peas and asparagus and an arugula salad with pepperoncini & white beans. It was delicious. He had the proof of a new book of poems of his due out soon, which I admired and praised despite the cover image, by a painter to whom I had introduced him years ago and then thought better of. It was a congenial evening.
And then, similarly, a few nights ago, my small daughter’s father and I met at a brewery for her school’s parent orientation, and lingered afterward over good Belgian beer to catch up, as we do every month or two. Debrief around our daughter, our informal custody schedule, our extended families and shared friends, whom we have also managed to travel to see and host together these last few months. Really, it is remarkable to me, after acrimonious separations, that we get along as well as we do, appreciate each other so much more, now that we are not trying to be a couple.
Of course, it’s not just my friend’s marriage I envy, but his wife, being married to him, specifically. Even before he and I knew each other, I admired his work, the mind and heart his poems reflect. As I’ve gotten to know him better, I’ve also come to respect him as a devoted father and husband and advocate for justice, his warmth and charm and openness and even his reserve, which seems only appropriate to an attractive man, who has sworn off philandering (if ever he indulged in the first place), to whom I am no doubt not alone in being drawn.
I am also given pangs when, on social media, friends post photos on their anniversaries, with captions like “Still my best friend after all these years.” It reminds me of how I felt, decades ago, when I was struggling with infertility and miscarriage and everyone and her sister seemed to be pregnant or pushing a stroller. Now, as someone without a spouse, I feel a bit like a shelter animal, having been shuttled from one relationship to the next these last 10 years, as to and from so many foster homes, hoping that one might be forever.
Like self-pity and pride, envy is looked upon unfavorably in most self-satisfied social circles. These are unseemly emotions, best denied and repressed. Except, of course, that among even more insufferably enlightened sets, denial and repression, too, are eschewed, so it falls to us to breach the taboo by confessing all of them.
Having come clean to self-pity and envy, I am left with pride, or the scraps of it I cling to in lieu of self-esteem. These days, pride often masquerades as “gratitude,” its disingenuous cousin, given to fits of humble bragging.
Instead of the stray dog analogy, I might then employ that of the traveler: True, I have not had a home to call my own all of these years, either literally or in a relationship, but I have been places and seen and done things I wouldn’t have had I been more permanently rooted. Bodies, for example—beautiful and various and pulsing with life—as well as regions—dark and light—in my own heart, and those of my fellow humans. I have fallen in love a precious few times. I have tried, and I have erred, and I have tried again. I have been courted and seduced, reciprocated these rituals, and been at liberty to consummate relationships without being unfaithful to anyone (except, occasionally, myself). It has not been over twenty-five years since I felt overwhelmed by carnal desire, for a stranger or a friend, and was able to act on it. I have had the thrill of a first kiss and sex with a new person, not just as a teenager or young adult, but as a grown woman, increasingly comfortable in my own skin, less self-conscious, less inhibited, more generous, and, I like to think, more skilled.
I have also been abandoned and heartbroken enough to have genuine compassion for others and the will to be, first and foremost, kind.
Most days, I would still trade all of this for a single life-long love. That remains what I aspire to, what I hope for almost every time I undertake a new relationship, what I am hoping for now, six months into my most recent, long distance, with another writer, a man who has written three beautiful books and paddled two hundred miles of the river he grew up on with a mind to writing a fourth. A man who knows the names of plants and animals I don’t, whose hands are as strong and gentle as the rest of him, whose shy smile makes me want to straddle him in public. I feel more ready than ever--having sewn my oats, admitted my faults, and practiced as diligently as humanly possible to learn to love well, and yet I can’t know.
I have another friend, a concert musician, in the habit of taking auditions with orchestras around the country on a regular basis. This has been the case as long as I have known her, seven or eight years now, and no doubt long before that. For each one, she trains for months ahead of time, as if for a triathlon (which she also does, badass that she is), puts in innumerable hours, studies tirelessly, travels at great expense, sets her heart on it. Often, she advances to the semi-finals or even the finals, at least once for the New York Phil., but she has yet to win the job of her dreams. I’ve sometimes wondered how and why she persists, what makes her so resilient, how she copes with so much rejection and yet remains steadfast in her pursuit. Neither one of us has cheated death, nor will we, and yet we both seem to have been assigned a Sisyphean task. Meanwhile, there is the music.
Brit Washburn is a graduate of the Creative Writing Program at Interlochen Arts Academy in Northern Michigan, where she was born and raised, and of Goddard College in Vermont. She also studied at Eugene Lang College in New York City and at the University of Hawaii, and lived in Brazil, France, and Italy, before moving to Charleston, South Carolina, in 2005, and to Asheville, NC, in 2017. The winner of two consecutive Albion Prizes for Poetry, judged by the poets Gary Snyder and Ai respectively, Brit's work has appeared in Art Mag, The Albion Review, Alexandria Quarterly, Controlled Burn, Culture-Keeper, The Dunes Review, Earth's Daughters, Foreword Magazine,Gratefulness.org, Guideword, Heartland Review, Manoa, and A New Song, as well as the anthologies, Mourning Our Mothers: Poems About Loss, A New Guide to Charleston and What Matters, among others. Brit has been awarded an artist's grant by the Vermont Studio Center and for many years served on the board of the Poetry Society of South Carolina, and the Low Country Initiative on the Literary Arts (LILA). She co-directed the salon Poets House South and works as a freelance writer, editor, and indexer for publishers and individuals, including University of Virginia Press, Baker Publishing Group / Brazos Press, and Eerdmans Publishing. The mother of four children ranging in age from six to twenty-one, Brit is also a Montessori school teacher. She is the author of the poetry collection, Notwithstanding (Wet Cement Press, 2019), and the forthcoming essay collection, Trial and Failure: 40 Attempts on Love, Motherhood, Poetry and Purpose. She enjoys reading, stretching, drinking tea, taking the same long walk every day, and cooking and eating lots of vegetables.