Tilt

Living Betwixt

My car idles between two orange traffic cones and a pair of “No Parking” signs across the street from my son’s school. It’s moments after morning drop-off and my face is slick with tears as I clutch my cheeks and sob into my palm.

I’ve made it through the hour between my son’s 7:20 alarm until now: sang his morning song to him, microwaved his pancakes, survived the dash across four lanes of rush hour traffic as he quizzed me on the countries of the former Soviet Republic; my reward, holding his hand down the school sidewalk until a friend appeared and he pulled it away, then the tangle of parents, kids, and projects pushed through the playground chain link gate in time for the bell.

I lingered to catch my son looking over his shoulder to see if I was still watching him walk in, rewarded again by his small smile when he sees that I did. He’s eight years old, and also three, and eighteen and thirty-eight. Time held in the tilt of his head, his enthusiastic gait, the boy he’s been and the person he’ll become compressed within his backpacked skin and bones.

But none of this is why I cry, idled in my car unable to drive, the pressure of regulating self so that the jagged pieces I hold together don’t impact the rise of my child’s day, and now, mission accomplished, this relief in the release.

The tears could be depression. Or because I’m forty-five, at midlife, understanding we may or may not see the full fruition of things. Understanding this while also still moving forward with ambitions and the assumption there’s still time in which to move forward through.

Holding hands with both the youth and age of myself, as I tip into the next iteration of identity—it seems this an every-five-years event, never any arrival point, time marching, continuous—but I think it’s the living in-between my own hopes, efforts, and revised dreams, living between primaries and elections, school schedules and summer breaks, between social media scrolls, waking and sleep, effort and end of day collapse which is the work.

It’s living between a football kicker’s commencement speech re-glamorizing domestic vocation for young female graduates, the hijacking of talking points separate from the underlying message, living between the small space of time in which we were able to choose what happened to our bodies—regardless of what our choice might be—as that time dissolves into the revised narrative of an ancient story.

It's the living within the re-weaponization of my religion, against its origin of love, in the interest of hate and condemnation, living in a red state with blue pockets, all of us laid out on the same battlefield of culture wars; holding it together for school drop-offs and coffee meetings, work presentations and dinner time. It’s holding all the ages of self in the yoga clad skin and bone of a day.

There’s a note that surfaced one day written from my three-year-old self through my late thirties’ self via a writing prompt:

“In the spring of my third birthday, I watched my mother, a cardinal humming around a lit stage, slick, bosom thrust, out of my reach. She sang to a man I didn’t know and then kissed him on the lips. My father and I were nestled in the dim theater, at the peak where the light from the spotlight met the dark, and with my mom’s kiss, curiosity warmed me like the morning sun.

It was the final dress rehearsal for ‘Oklahoma’ and my mother was the lead. The following night the congregation from my father’s church would come to witness their Preacher’s wife commit acceptable adultery. 

Years from now I’d joke that this was the seed of my life as an actress. But on that night, it was my world tilting on a new axis. I glanced at my father; his eyes were soft. His gentle smile didn’t falter. In that moment, a shift, an awareness that things aren’t always as they seem, and that’s as it should be.”

Age 27. Living in-between the desire to have an audience at my Off-Broadway show, and the abhorrence of self promotion. I’ve yet no idea the necessity of this tension. I’m a baby.

Ok. Okay. So what to do with these moments? The present-but-also-fleeting-school-drop-off-weight-of-the world moment, the more-refined-as-there’s-been-years-of-reflection-glimmer from my three-year-old consciousness, the trillions of moments lived between three-year-old self and now?

Each of us on our personal axis tilting through sunlight, moonlight, darkness, collecting days.

There’s the steadfast hesed of my father’s gaze toward my mother as she unfurled her full self onstage, this an imprint on my heart, a consistency amidst expression, a child’s uncertain moment made constant from love.

There’s the comfort now in idling. A juncture of rest. The release of tears. The saltiness on my face. The two traffic cones set as though directing me to perch between them like a migrant bird. There’s the expanse beyond self as I cry, even my anxieties striving for connection with the unseen world of others’ anxieties, griefs and hopes. I hover in place amid the hefty seen and felt.

There’s my son glancing over his shoulder, confirming he remains held in my gaze even as he walks away from me.

There’s the work ahead. I, one among many, seeking hope and togetherness in our distance, finding it in the most daily of places, the compression of selves that we’ve been and the ones we’ll become held within.

May we tilt toward each other.