A New Normal

What’s clear about my focus is that I don’t have one save getting through this first year of widowhood. I seem to be flailing around between all the old possibilities of how to take up my time as a single person and leaving openings in my life for something new to walk in.

I’m not looking for a new partner, a man to save me. I have my doubts there is someone out there in the world who would want to take on the job. That’s not the point.

What I’d like to find is some ease with myself, some semblance of the old reality where I thrilled to wake up in the morning, and I felt a passion for such things as writing, gardening, putting pieces of material together in a planned fashion to form a pattern and eventually a quilt. I want to lose myself in the glory of a morning watching the sun chase the frost across the winter meadow.

Words. I want to enjoy words again. I want to piece them together and watch how they can play against each other and layer themselves against a backdrop to create a precious moment or some kind of tension.

I want to be able to describe a scene again with a new combination of words to inspire a thought or a feeling. Like: frosted silhouettes of oak and pine huddle against a sky webbed with filaments of white and gray clouds in front of a paling blue sky.

Or

The broken nose of the clay face re-hung on the tree trunk closest to the kitchen window smiled its familiar tooth-studded smile as if promising this morning was just like any morning before its mishap with the winter wind.

Richness . . . Beauty . . . Depth. I want it back in all the places of my life. Not this numbness creeping from outside toward my gut or invading my limbs from inside my heart like warriors wiggling out of their Trojan horse.

Yet, every time I turn around, my life’s rhythm is shattered, yet again with another memory another thing to do, or another mishap. I’m frozen in some kind of limbo and, try as I might to create a new norm, I fall back onto old habits and customs of behavior that used to bring me joy but help me dig a deeper hole into myself.

I’m discovering that eating doesn’t bring the same comfort. Pop corn is meant to be shared, tossed at another person, its smell to be enjoyed by two.

Dinners are meant to be prepared in concert with two pairs of hands.

Cookies and cakes are baked to please two sets of palates.

Beds are meant to be slept in and made together.

Sundays are best enjoyed with football and chilly walks holding hands along the frosty driveway to the freeway.

Everything else is second best. And I guess, that’s the new norm.

Showers are now personal rituals of cleansing my chakras rather than a prelude to an afternoon on the bed under the sun’s warmth next to a familiar body.
Meals are creative stir fries for one or small casseroles baked for four dinners.

Writing can be done anytime of the day or night with no one to stop the project in midstream and draw me onto another strand of thought.

Plans can be made on the spur of the moment. The house can be left however it is and returned to when its time.

Every silly little thing I set down stays where I leave it, and I can only blame my memory rather than my favorite, loving scapegoat if I can’t find something.

Silence can reign until I desire the company of music or radio or TV chatter.

I can’t say I’m busily successful with this new norm. I can’t say I like it very much. All I can admit to is that once in a while it’s OK. If I don’t think too hard and get smacked with a memory, I can put one foot in front of the other and walk through each moment, praying the numbness will thaw, and, when it does, my skin and heart will not hurt too much.