“There must have been a moment, at the beginning, where we could have said — no.
But somehow we missed it.”
Tom Stoppard
Maia Flore
That quote, or one very much like it, was tacked above my desk in the apartment where I lived during my senior year at the University.
I wrote it down on one of my study cards because of Carol’s brother Dave.
He fell asleep at the wheel.
Dave was just a year ahead of us in school, and we had been at a party together the week before.
The enormity of the fragility of life, at an age when we were supposed to be immortal, shook me, and put me into an early depression at a time when I was meant to be living high.
This quote returns to me now, 30 years later, when I visit another college friend. After another accident.
I’m trying my best to stay focused, but this election cycle is so compelling.
I allow myself a 20 minute Bernie break, and then I shut my laptop and walk away.
But the world is conspiring.
SHE is conspiring.
To give birth.
To something new.
My Pandora shuffle of classical music is interrupted by a commercial. About daycare. How it hurts Vermont businesses when parents can’t work.
I woke with thoughts like this. About how the system is rigged.
I hate that expression of Bernie’s. The implication of victimhood.
Empowerment is my preference. (I’m a woman.)
The commercial thrusts me back to the blue arm chair in the small farm house where I nursed my first baby. Daycare so costly. Work barely profitable. His chubby hand twisting my hair. The thought of leaving him, unbearable.
Embroidery and graphite on fabric by Ana Teresa Barboza
Over the weekend, I wrote–Loved Ones: a meditation on toxicity–and was surprised to see so many readers drawn in, particularly on a Saturday night.
I wrote about the sluggishness that came in the aftermath of my son’s initiation… into the family… tragedy. But I didn’t explain that I was equally weighed down by the residue of a respiratory infection. Loitering congestion. In my ears and throat and lymph nodes.
I realize now that this led me to the provocative image that I chose for the piece–or that chose me. After the piece was published, the image continued to play with my consciousness and I found myself responding to a request by an artist on Facebook:
Ok, Saturday-night-stay-in’s –
if you post a picture i will write a poem about it.
Just say, “Hi dug- pic poem, please.”
I sent this and in return he wrote this:
Kelly Salasin’s Kill Strategy
a pic poem by dug Nap (For Kelly)
Anytime she’s not so sure kelly always goes for the jugular
I was stunned by the violence of this tiny piece. Had the artist read my article? Was he judging me? Why hadn’t he taken a scientific angle on this anatomic study–which could have been on the kitchen table, on any given morning, of my childhood, before my father left for the operating room.
When I went in to see the doctor last week, she put me on the table, and massaged down my throat, coaxing toxins from my lymph nodes.
I hadn’t realized that I was so filled.
With rage.
Not until my son read a single line from the email he received from the relative.
(He refused to let me hear more.)
He was writing back.
I grabbed his laptop, pleaded:
“Please don’t respond again. She’ll only be more venomous. She can’t handle boundaries.”
My son was amused by my passion. He insisted that I didn’t need to worry. That he would be okay.
So with him, I shared the spontaneous visions that were occurring in my mind’s eye on his behalf:
Tearing flesh with fanged teeth.
Ripping jugular veins as a three-headed beast.
Becoming a thousand insects, devouring her brain.
Faced with the mythical proportions of his mother’s protective instinct, he turned toward his father, and calmly challenged his aloofness:
“Where are your feelings,” he asked.
“I am so used to this,” my husband said.
“But she cc-ed you on the Goddamn email,” my son said. “She fucking invited you to watch as she kicked your son in the face.”
My husband remained silent.
We went to bed numb.
As I settled under the covers, it occurred to me that my vision could potentially be injurious so I mustered Metta to send to the One who had attacked my child.
A week has since passed, but the meditation on toxicity continues to force itself into another day. This morning, a Mary Oliver line comes to mind:
Someone I loved once gave me a box full of darkness. It took me years to understand that this too, was a gift.
My husband’s gift is the understanding that he never learned that boundaries were possible–among loved ones–from whom he must claim where he begins… and they end.
Our son wasn’t angry with either of us.
He was simply sad.
He wanted to understand:
How had we lived our entire lives without ever saying, like he had:
Maia Flore 
(artist: George Redhawk) 
My husband’s gift is the understanding that he never learned that boundaries were possible–among loved ones–from whom he must claim where he begins… and they end.
The Empty Nest Diary 