Three Things

A dear friend -- one of the two of you who read this blog -- mentioned to me recently that every night before she goes to sleep she thinks of three good things that happened that day.

I thought, "That's a really lovely idea."

I thought, "I'd never take the time to do it. In fact, I've been having such a rough few weeks that the very idea of trying to think of three good things every day would either make me slit my wrists or cheat by saying, 'The Boy, The Boy, The Boy.'"

By "rough few weeks" I mean: The Boy got an ear infection and missed nearly a week of school. This means that I missed nearly a week of the opportunity to not have to choose between yoga, a shower, or work during the hopefully two hours of his nap. That weekend, my parents visited and I played tour guide on an average of three hours of sleep a night (see "The Boy got an ear infection") trying to convince them that Asheville is a perfectly wonderful place to live and stressing over my now regrettable choice to prioritize showers and yoga over work. The Boy's ear infection did not respond to Amoxycyllin, so not only were we treated to the illusion that the infection lasted as long as my pregnancy but he ended up on Suprax, which, while apparently tasty, is quite strong and bothers a boy's stomach. As a consequence, he had a really bad week at school. On his one good day, I was desperately trying to get us packed for a weekend in West Virginia at my sister-in-law's house. Lovely as that time was, I failed to bring the power cord for my computer and probably wouldn't have done any work even if I had. On our return home, mother-in-law in tow, exhausted from the effort of trying to act like a person you would want married to a member of your family, I groggily searched for things I could convince myself my mother-in-law really wanted to do while I grabbed a few minutes to work on my laptop in the local bookstore downtown or at the Grove Park Inn, where I paid $12.95 for internet access before realizing I would have to print out those documents that had been emailed to me and was doing nothing more productive than giving myself a migraine and a burning desire to throw my computer in the oversized fireplace near the table where I was working.

So, now that our house is once again empty but for two adults, a 10 1/2 month old, and two hound dogs, now that I have finally completed that work project that was hanging over my head, now that I have taken my second yoga class since moving to Asheville, now that The Boy has started his week with a really excellent day at school, I believe it's time. Three good things.

First, I am a Virgo.

That is not a good thing, at least according to every assessment of the Virgo personality as controlling and critical (a trait I will admit to only because I direct all of my control and criticism at myself). I've rarely thought of myself as a Virgo -- the stay-at-home, quiet type -- and I certainly have lived up to my fantasy of myself as an energetic socializer for some decent periods of my younger days, not all of them even in college. During the four weeks I lived on an ashram outside Boulder, Colorado, training for my yoga teaching certification, I carefully studied an astrology book that explained my non-Virgo-ness. (If you care, on my chart the Sun is just barely in Virgo, while Mercury, Venus, and Mars all reside in Leo in some house that has something to do with public appearances.)

But the truth of the matter is, when you pass 40 and the best thing that can happen in your life is for The Boy to sleep past 6:30 and your partner is your best and pretty much only friend, well, anyone can become a Virgo.

This means that, while I love visitors and travel and being able to look at my calendar filled with notations in different colored pens, I'm really at my best when my days are steady and predictable and end with me lying slack on the couch in front of an episode of The Amazing Race.

Hence, the past month plus has been more of a strain than I like to admit. It has been hard with visitors to us and visits to others trying to fit what I need to get done into an even more compact space of time than my usual four hours between getting home from dropping The Boy off at school and leaving home to pick The Boy up from school. (My sister once pointed out to me that I could save some time by driving him there instead of walking, but, as I believe I have mentioned, I tend to experience some difficulty altering my favored routines.)

It's been even harder trying to be a decent daughter-in-law/sister-in-law/partner/mother when I am suffering anxiety attacks over the work I'm not getting done and then feeling guilty about displaying my crazy side to my in-laws or subjecting Hubby to my crazy side yet again. The one thing I will not do is be crazy in not-a-funny-Mommy way in front of The Boy, which means I am that much more pinched and jumpy with the others from whom I am trying to hide my craziness.

So what exactly, you are asking yourself, is the good thing? And why am I reading this?

The good thing is that I have a family who visits because we want them to and whom we visit because we enjoy it. A family who forgives me for being anxious and crazy, even if I'm loathe to forgive myself.

A family that, unlike being a Virgo, is a good thing.

Second, The Boy. The Boy, The Boy, The Boy. Because even if it is cheating to use him for all three things, it would be a crime to leave him off the list. Even when I held him from 1:00 until 2:30 last night while he was teething and finally let him cry in his crib because I really, really had to pee. Even when he wipes his runny nose on my sleeve and then cries if I try to use a proper item for the job. Even when he holds onto my leg rather than play with all the great things I have put on the kitchen floor for him because it is hard to cut up an apple when you are holding a 20-pound boy in one arm.

The Boy. Because he has the best four-toothed smile I have ever seen and it never fails to make me smile back.

Third, my dreams. Not my dream of "One day I will write a critically acclaimed yet still best-selling novel and be free to spend my days creating stories in my office where I will finally have hung the curtains and found a good rug and which will not be cold all the time despite being over the front porch and therefore not very well insulated."

Not the dreams where you wake up warm and jelly-like and frequently a little bit embarrassed about what you have been dreaming.

The dreams I mean here are my anxiety dreams.

My dreams in times of anxiety follow two patterns. There are the wave dreams. I am trying to swim in the waves and I am terrified and about to drown and out of control. Or I am watching the waves and scared of them because if I were in them I would be terrified and about to drown and out of control. Occasionally, when I am feeling really good about my life, I conquer my fear of the waves and have a lovely swim, but it never seems to last.

And then there are the bus dreams. I clearly remember relating my first bus dream to my friend Joe senior year of college when we both had finished our theses on time and spent pretty much every afternoon for the remainder of our college days at the Grad Center Bar splitting a pitcher of beer, smoking cigarettes (okay, I generally smoked "cigarette"), and listening to Tracy Chapman with tears of angst and determination in our eyes.

In the bus dreams, I am either on a bus and don't know where I'm going or I get off the bus and don't know where I am and everyone I know is still on the bus leaving me further and further behind. It does not take a Ph.D. in psychology to figure out my bus dreams.

As the years have gone by and I have moved further and further away from holding down anything that resembles a real job, the bus has sometimes morphed into an airplane which is going more quickly toward a definite destination but never seems to land. Unless I am late for the plane, usually in my childhood bedroom unable to leave my parents' house. The first type of airplane dream suggests that I feel I am progressing toward my destination in life. The second does not.

The other night, it was a bus again. A school bus, in fact. In Malibu, where I spent my first few years of elementary school. The bus went up a street I didn't recognize and deposited me in a big house I didn't know with a kind of a creepy man whose role in the dream I haven't yet figured out.

But in the house, young and beautiful and nearly forgotten by me, was Roxanne. My first baby. Four-legged, velvet-eared, but no less my baby than The Boy.

When someone is that close to your heart, when they love you fiercely and unconditionally, even if or maybe more so because they are canine, you are very, very lucky. You are lucky even nearly two years after you lose them because you no longer have days when you are so anxious and buried that you don't have time for a cuddle. You are lucky because, even if you know that your partner loves you unconditionally, and your baby as well as a baby knows how to love, you can still remember when she was all you had. So you not only remember how lucky you were to have her, but you are reminded of how very, very, very lucky you are to have all you have now.

Most of all, you are lucky because when you need that kind of love, she is there, in a dream. And she feels as real as she is.

If it takes six weeks of feeling like I just can't keep up any more, like all I can do when I have so much to do is cry, like the days are getting colder and there are fewer people to smile at on the sidewalks -- if that's what it takes to have a few minutes with Roxanne, then that's a good thing too.