Doctor Who Goes to the Oscars

It's Oscar night. All America is watching the Oscars. I am watching Doctor Who Revisited on BBC-America. Dear God, thank you for the BBC.

I'm supposed to be at an Oscars-viewing party but I am home nursing two sick cats and an incipient case of massive depression.  I'm the depressed one; the kitties just have a rather disgusting pooping problem.

I'd rather have a pooping problem. Tho' actually, to be perfectly honest, pooping problems are somewhat intrinsic to depression. You get depressed; your tummy gets its own version; you have pooping problems. But I am totally not blogging about that.

Depression. I am blogging about depression. (You thought it was the Oscars, didn't you? Bwah hah hah!) Here's the thing: I fight constantly against depression. Tonight, tho', depression gets a victory. Just a minor one, mind you [she types confidently]. I am staging a tactical retreat. My reserves are exhausted; I await reinforcements; I flee back to the ramparts.

In other words, I empty the house (sick kitties don't count) and I watch Doctor Who. Tomorrow I resume the fight. I will claim happiness. I will be fun and funny; I will have the energy for my fellow human beings. Tonight. . . tonight,  I need Time Lords and aliens.

Is it bad to prefer the company of Daleks and Cybermen to actual friends and family members? Perhaps a wee bit insane? OK, yes, I do realize the correct answer is "yes." Choosing fantasy aliens is probably not high on the list of acceptable responses to depression. But you know, this is the great thing about facing down 50: The boundaries of "acceptable" prove to be more and more elastic.

At this rate, by the time I hit 60 I'll no longer leave the house and I'll talk only to my cats. Still, cats are Doctor Who fans (I mean, it's obvious). So, all will be well. Maybe in a bizarre, slightly twisted, not exactly normal way, but I no longer aspire toward normalcy. Just being well. And if wellness involves time travel and incredibly sexy aliens and huge doses of fantasy (as well as incontinent kitties), so what?

Geez louise. Go see Silver Linings Playbook (it's up for the Oscar for Best Picture). Then explain to me how to define "normal."

Child-free Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving approaches and I am depressed. Also relieved. But mostly depressed.

For the first time in 21 years, I face a Thanksgiving without at least one son. Son #1 is staying in Oregon to focus on his senior thesis. (This is not my fault; I did not give him this work ethic.) Son #2 is in, of all places, Sri Lanka.  (Can I just say, this is not normal; we are not the sort of family who holiday in Sri Lanka; I, for one, have never been to Sri Lanka or anywhere in the vicinity of Sri Lanka.)

So I face this child-free Thanksgiving and I am depressed. I'm astonished how depressed I am.

And here's where the relief comes in. I've wondered-- fairly frequently in the last few years-- if I lack some essential Mom Gene, if I'm deficient in fundamental maternal, uh, stuff. Because many of my friends and acquaintances have kids about the same age as mine, which means many of my friends and acquaintances are sending off their youngest child to college or university, which means many of my friends and acquaintances have been slogging around in various stages of grief as they confront the absence of young Taylor or Tyler or Madison or Morgan. And I nod, and hold hands, and say, "Oh, I know," --but I don't. I don't. Hugh went off to boarding school last year, and with Owen off in Oregon, that left us with an empty nest, and well, frankly, in our childless house, Keith and I look at each other and go, "Cool!"

Except now it's Thanksgiving, almost, and my boys aren't here and damn. Damndamndamndamn. I am sad. I miss my guys. And suddenly I realize this is it, they won't be here much any more, hardly ever really, and the ache in my gut and heart really really hurts. Which is kind of a relief. It's good to know I'm not some sort of deficient Un-Mom.

Except it hurts. It really really hurts.

Damn. I need someone to nod and hold my hand and say, "Oh, I know."

Shit. I need my boys.

Losing

Here it comes.

I can feel the shift in air pressure, the slight sense of movement beneath my feet, something akilter, something sliding, slippiing, giving way.

I know what' s happening. I'm intimately acquainted with the process. This should all be old hat, routine, no big deal.

So I do what I know needs to be done. I make sure I'm eating right. I set up an exercise routine. I resume my church attendance. I email old friends. I call my sister. I re-read my best-loved books. I make love to my husband. Carefully, consciously, mindfully, I erect the barricades, shore up the defences, solidify the walls.

But it's all pointless. I do know that. How could I not know that? Depression doesn't mount a frontal assault. It's not an attacking army. It's more like a poisonous gas; it floats over and gently, insidiously, unstoppably wends its way down; it curls up in the junctures; it lingers; it accumulates; it deadens.

It wins.

On the Bike

I've bought a bike. I am Woman. Biking Woman.

Really sore Biking Woman.

Good lord. Amazing what happens to one's post-50 body when one does little to move that body (blame the foot surgery) for several months.

Still, aching thighs and sore butt and all, I'm feeling good. (Even though I meant to buy a moderately priced old lady bike and instead shelled out an astounding, horrifying, yay downright embarrassing amount of money for Le Ultra Light Totally Cool Sleekly Silver Moderny Metallic old lady bike. All our retirement funds now ride on this bike.)

You see, I used to ride a bike. A 1970s bright blue ten-speed. I worked all summer at Moy's Chinese Carry-Out to earn the money to buy that bike. I faithfully oiled and greased it. I conquered the frontage roads of west suburban Chicago on that bike. And then, in graduate school, I realized one of my deepest dreams: I became a city cyclist. All over the North Side and downtown Chicago, I dodged taxi cabs and behemoth buses, streaked through red lights, careened across sidewalks and onto the lakefront bikepath, sped through clusters of tourists and lost pods of Cubs fans, and pedaled like fury past the Juneway Jungle, a notorious gang hangout on my way home to my studio apartment in Rogers Park. I was young and life was good and Chicago was amazing and the future was wide open. I have never been so happy as I was on that bike in that city.

And now I'm middle-aged and life is complicated and Baton Rouge ain't Chicago and the future is all hemmed in by the past and the present. I have spent much of the last two decades learning to negotiate happiness in the midst of chronic headaches and bouts of clinical depression.

But I can still ride a bike.

And--pedalling in the lowest gear, at a pace barely able to keep the bike upright--I remember what it was like to feel, to feel, goddamn, to feel like me.

Something That Will Stay

So, in what is perhaps yet another sign of the onset of dementia, I am thinking about getting a tattoo. That I'm contemplating such a bizarre action is all, of course, Owen's fault. To say that Owen is into tattoos is to put it mildly. And he was home for six weeks for his Christmas break, which gave him lots of time to indoctrinate me. I'll admit I'm easily indoctrinated these days--the result, perhaps, of menopause or general aging, or maybe incipient insanity, or who knows, too much acupuncture or Sauvignon Blanc or my inability to exercise (still wearing post-foot surgery boot). Whatever the cause, I find myself becoming more and more amoeba-like, just a glop of protoplasm, slipping and slithering in and out of various shapes, no clear center, no fixed boundaries, no firmness of body or purpose or routine. So? A tattoo? slllliiiiippp, ssssllliiitherrr, ssssllllllimmmme, oh why not?

But just a little one. Just a teeny tiny tattoo. A hedgehog. A very English hedgehog. In memory of a delightful day at a hedgehog sanctuary in Devon when we lived in England and the boys were small and I was their Mum.

Owen's back at college in Oregon. He hopes to spend the summer up there as well. And probably all future summers. He'll be back next Christmas, but never again for several weeks--his lengthy break this year was an anomoly, an unexpected benefit of his fall semester internship. So, this was it, really. He'll be back for visits, but I doubt he'll ever live here, with us, with me, again.

Maybe I'll make it a great big hedgehog.

Hair Ball

This morning I sat and watched my kitty cough up a hair ball. If you're not a cat owner, you may not be familiar with this extraordinary sight. The cat freezes, makes a series of other-planetary sounds, extends her neck so that she looks like some sort of creature out of Dr. Seuss, coughs, gags, coughs, gags, and then convulses. Rewind. Repeat until hair ball (one of life's more disgusting byproducts) appears.

As I watched, this overwhelming sense of deja vu enveloped me. I dismissed it: of course I've been here before; I've had cats for years. But then I realized it wasn't deja vu, actually, but more that sense of being reminded, of parallels pushing you toward a memory not of what was in front of you but of something else, something sort of similar but really very different. And slowly, fitfully--rather like coughing up a hair ball, actually--I recognized the memory evoked by my gagging kitty: therapy.

My kitty contorting herself to produce this mass of indigestible, glutinous gunk perfectly embodied the process of undergoing therapy (when the therapy is working, that is). You sit there and at first you freeze but eventually these noises emerge and then you find yourself coughing and gagging and over many many sessions and much more emotional coughing and mental gagging, you find yourself stretching and straining and it's not right and you weren't meant to feel this way and you want it to stop but it doesn't, you don't, and then, and then, and then, eventually, maybe, there's the hair ball. But it's not over, because now you and the therapist have to dissect the hair ball, and seeing what's in the thing is almost as bad as coughing it up in the first place.

Curled up like a fossilized ammonite, my kitty sleeps on the wooly blanket atop the sofa. She clearly has no memory of and no interest in her hair balls. She wretches them up and moves on, unaware.

I gotta say, measure me against my kitty on the scale of emotional wellbeing and the kitty wins, hands (paws) down. Self-awareness is just not all it's cracked up to be.

Needing Dumbledore on Thanksgiving

Watching Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (as one does on Thanksgiving night). The inferi have grabbed him; they've pulled him into the water; he's drowning.

Stuffed with Thanksgiving food and family, Keith and Hugh recline on their respective sofas (we are a two-sofa family), caught up in Harry's travails, yet utterly relaxed. But I, feeling somewhat alienated as usual by the whole ordeal of "Thanksgiving at the In-Laws' [who are supposed to be my family but let's face it, they're not], I find myself utterly transfixed by this scene, which so perfectly, horribly, accurately embodies the experience of chronic depression, the lifelong fight against those creatures who pull you in and suck you under.

Harry's now been saved by Dumbledore and his wand. I could use a Dumbledore right now. Or even just a Hermione and a Ron, to walk with me past the Whomping Willow and through the Forbidden Forest, til we find ourselves safe at Hagrid's cottage, in front of a roaring fire.

Pale Tongue

I have a pale tongue. I didn't know that my tongue was paler than most; I guess I haven't paid much attention to tongue coloration. I know now about my pale tongue because my acupuncturist told me so. Yes, my acupuncturist. I now have an acupuncturist. And I am now ingesting massive quantities of Chinese herbs. I feel so totally alternative, like I should dress in flowy, ankle-long, brightly colored skirts and hiking boots while I grind my own flour. This plunge into alternativity is motivated by my never-ending quest for relief from chronic daily headaches. Western medicine has failed me; I turn to the East.

But back to the tongue. Turns out possession of a pale tongue is Bad. So Acupuncturist Guy is hopeful that sticking me with needles and plying me with herbal concoctions will help with not only the headaches but also clogged sinuses, insomnia, menopause, depression, and my inability to understand football. OK, not the last one.

Am I hopeful? Hmm. Over the last several years I have worked with many a hopeful medical-type person, ranging from the Svaroopa yoga therapist to the neurologist, the sleep specialist to the TMJ dentist to the chiropractor, the osteopath, and the deep-tissue masseuse. I have learned much. I have spent much. And still I am more of a Headache with a person, than a Person with a headache. "Hopeful" means "full of hope" and I can't say hope is sloshing over my brim, but still, yep, there's a bit of it swirling around in the bottom of the cup.

In a funk

I'm in a funk.

Could be a menopausal funk--the gloom brought on by increasing quantities of facial fur--matched only by the decreasing volume of head hair--and the pounds that seem to fly on and stick to my stomach like flies on a dead squirrel and the ever-decreasing libido that makes me feel like the Frigid Bitch of the North.

Could be a generational funk--the fear that I've failed to realize my potential as a scholar, the sense that my students regard me as this sometimes amusing historical relic, my longing to Do Something or Be Someone Important.

Could be an existential funk--the doubts about meaning and truth and purpose, the growing restlessness with going through the motions,the impatience with answers that used to satisfy and arguments that once seemed convincing.

Dunno.

Just know that I lay in bed last night and thought, "Life is just a bunch of orifices, just a matter of in and out." You eat, you drink, you poop, you pee, you have sex, you listen, you repeat, you smell, you sneeze. . . hydration, consumption, defecation, urination, copulation, communication, organization. . . all just a matter of in and out in and out in and out. . .

in and out in and out again and again on and on and on just life in the lower-case no capitals no highlights no need for punctuation and the more you go on the more the highs and lows level out and it's just this vast plain this tundra and the colors all fade and the whites turn dingy and the blacks lose their vibrancy so it's all the same dreary grey grizzle and you can't hear the laughter or the screams just the low ceaseless moan and the monotonous buzz buzz buzz of fake lighting and soon itjustallcollapsesinonandtheresnothingintheuniversebutfakepolitepeopleataneternal cocktailpartywithwatereddowndrinksandpackagedtastelesssnacksandsoyoubegintowonderififif

So. I'm thinking, brownies.

Baby Love

A couple of days ago, I found out that a friend of mine, who's older than I am, has just adopted a newborn baby. I'm happy for him and his partner. Really. So very very happy. Honestly.

Excuse me, it is possible for one to be be genuinely happy for someone while at the same time consumed with jealous rage. One is a complex being. One is capable of multi-tasking one's emotions.

One really wants a baby.

Ridiculous. One is a menopausal mother of two teenaged sons.

So--Babies? Done and dusted. Shoot, I've even done it both ways: the birth-via-my-body thing and the adoption-via-massive-bucks thing. (Tho'--full disclosure here--I didn't actually go thru with the entire birthing process. I tried. I did. 24 hours of labor before the doctors jumped in with great glee, wielded those knives, and C-sected that baby outa there.)

And I have so many friends who've been unable to have a baby either way. I've hoped with them, screamed with them, cried with them. And I've mourned with friends who have lost their babies and agonized with friends who struggle daily with the horror of watching disease devastate their kids. I know how very very lucky, blessed, rich I am. I know I've had my share, more than my share, of beautiful, healthy babies, gorgeous sons with the world wide open before them.

I know all this. But. Dammit. I. Want. A. Baby.

It's sick. I find myself in the wee hours of the morning secretly hoping one of my boys will knock up a lovely young girl who will bravely decide to have the baby but will recognize she/they can't provide the baby with all that she/they want for that baby, and so, yes, I will get the baby.

Part of it is that I just really enjoy babies. Some people like football. Or Coen Brother movies. Or Andy Warhol. Me, I like babies.

But there's also the sad and dirty fact that when I had my babies, my beautiful boys, I was fairly fucked up. To put it mildly. (Not on drugs, mind you. Never done those. OK, yes, I've done lots of drugs--for allergies and tummy disorders and headaches and vulvadynia and depression and anxiety and chronic strep throat and yeast infections. But none of the fun stuff. ) Nope, no drugs, not that much alcohol. Just, well, basically, back then I was a total wingnut. Torn apart by the demands of scholarship and teaching and motherhood and wifedom and sisterhood and friendship and daughterdom and sex and laundry and lawn care and the desire for a really good brownie. I do not regret, then, that I returned to work right after the boys came into the world. Had I stayed home with them, they'd have ended up fairly fucked-up little fellas as well. Instead, I gotta say--despite the fact that neither seems capable of shutting a cabinet door, closing a dresser drawer, hanging up a towel, or flushing a toilet; despite the march of tattoos across Owen's body; despite Hugh's Republican leanings-- my guys are all right.

And, even in the context of total wingnutdom, I enjoyed them as babies.

Most of the time.

Sometimes.

When I wasn't crying because I feared that any kid with a mom like me was doomed.

But these days, despite menopausal mania, I think it's fair to say my wingnuttiness has moderated. I'm no longer shredded by the various demands of my various roles. I've learned to say, oh, what the hell. I've accepted that I will never be a Scholar Star. And (most of the time), I'm ok with that. These days, I could and I would stay home with a baby. We'd hang out, chill in the mornings over Cheerios, nap on the sofa, watch some Baby Einstein, do some park swings, snort some formula, while Springsteen played in the background. I do know that you're supposed to flood a baby with Mozart if you want him or her to be a math wizard, but the world has plenty of quantitative geniuses. Me and the imaginary baby, we prefer quality--political passion, concern for the underdog, respect for the way words work, sound narrative sense, and thumping rock 'n' roll. So we'd scrap the Mozart and follow Scooter and the Big Man into the swamps of Jersey.

Instead, I'm heading to the mall. Gotta go buy a baby gift for my friend. Which I will send with lots of joy, much love, an abundance of good wishes, and a hearty helping of good, old-fashioned, deep dark green envy.

Indelible Ink

Owen now has three tattoos, with another one scheduled for November. These are not discreet tattoos; they do not nestle around his ankle bone and wink from behind his shoulderblades. These are more like Bette Midler. They strut across the stage and belt out brassy show tunes.

"Slow down," I tell him. "You're 19. You've got a lot of years left and only a finite amount of flesh."

He's 19. He ignores me.

I want to shake him. I want to make him see reason. I want him to think ahead. I want him to consider the consequences. But much of the time, I just want to be him.

Once when Owen was in middle school, he asked me to proofread an English paper he had just finished. It was a good paper, and I told him so. I also suggested a number of ways he could improve it. He looked hard at me.
"The paper's good, right?"
"Yes, absolutely, I'm just--"
"Good enough to get a B?"
"Yes, definitely, probably an A, in fact, but it wouldn't be that much more work to just--"
He grinned and shook his head.
"I'm good," he said, and turned back to the PETA website.
I wanted to shake him. I wanted to make him see reason, to think ahead, to consider the consequences, to understand the importance of pushing and striving and setting high goals and achieving excellence and. . . and. . . dammit, mostly I just wanted to be him. To be so comfortable in my own skin that I could take a B on something I didn't care much about so I could spend time on what I thought really mattered.

I cannot imagine being so comfortable in my own skin that I could decorate it with permanent ink. I have never been good with permanence. I hate making choices of any kind, let alone lasting ones. What if I get it wrong? And then it's permanently wrong? I need to know there's a way to erase or at least revise what I have done; I need a Plan B. When Owen was about two weeks old, it hit me that for the first time in my life, I had no Plan B, that no matter what happened to him, I would always be his mother. Always. I broke down sobbing. I sat in the tub, shaking and gasping and crying, knowing I was not good enough for this, terror-stricken that I had dared do something so indelible.

In the years since, motherhood has brought me great wonder and unmatchable pleasure and immense satisfaction. Yet that leap into permanence has not taught me to to embrace decision-making and lasting choices. The terror of getting it all wrong remains. And so, I watch enviously and Owen grins. The needle bites his skin and inscribes it with indelible ink. He says, "I'm good."

Mac-and-Cheese

I made macaroni and cheese last night, from a new Weightwatcher's recipe. (I know, "Weightwatcher's" and "mac-and-cheese"--something of a contradiction in terms.) And I've been mired in nostalgia ever since.

Nostalgic, but not for my mom's mac-and-cheese. She never made it, weirdly enough for a 1960s Midwestern suburban housewife. And not even for college, when my roommate Marcia would eat an entire box of Kraft's Mac-and-Cheese, and say brightly, "Just 39 cents! Can you believe it?!"

No, the nostalgia focused on the small dining area of a semi-detached house on a quiet horseshoe street off the main road of a slightly gritty working-class neighborhood in Manchester. England. That's the North of England, depressed, post-industrial England, not the thatched-roof, hobbit-y, touristed South.

There, for three years in a tiny kitchen, I made macaroni and cheese from an English newspaper recipe, not out of the box, not glow-in-the-dark orange, but homemade and healthy, appealing to both adults and children. (This, of course, was before Owen, inspired by the animal rights movement, became a vegan, and before Hugh, out of deep anti-parent principles, stopped eating anything prepared by his mother or father. ) We ate together, every night.

And Keith had to leave for a meeting, every night. And the boys fought each other, every night. And I fought against--and frequently lost the battle to--depression many nights. Not exactly Andy Griffith or Leave It to Beaver.

And yet--was it the dairy? the carbs? maybe the olive oil or the whole wheat breadcrumbs?-there were these mac-and-cheese moments, just moments, yes, just little parentheses inserted in some fairly bleak paragraphs, but good moments, nonetheless, powerful parentheses, glimpses of Mayberry and Mayfield in gritty, rainy Manchester. And I miss that.

Jaunty

Keith and I spent the weekend in New Orleans with my good friend Karen and her husband. Karen and I go way back, back to Chicago and grad school, back to the Time Before Tenure, the era before House-and-Spouse. We've each moved the other; we've celebrated each other's victories and mourned each other's failures, and now we're both facing 50. (Actually, she hit 50 last month; I still have a few weeks left of my 40s. Just to, you know, be precise.)

Karen is facing her 50s with, well, glee. She's jumped into the research for a new book and thoroughly ensconced in academic life; she's thrilled with her husband and house and dogs; she has a couple of stepkids who are "done and dusted"--out and about and living fine adult lives; she's where she wants to be and doing what she wants to do. She's downright jaunty.

Jaunty. I don't think I've ever been jaunty. I'd like to be jaunty. But jauntiness seems to require energy and ambition, and I have neither. I blame menopause. Menopause is great. It's like teething with babies. "He's so fussy--he must be teething." "He feels hot--I think he's teething." "He's so clingy lately--I bet he's teething." "He's all congested--gotta be teething." Doesn't matter what it is, really, you just blame teething. Menopause works the same, but for middle-aged women rather than babies, obviously.

Except the thing is, I'm not sure I ever actually had energy and ambition. I used to think I was an energetic and ambitious up-and-comer but honestly, I think I was simply petrified. Scared shitless. Utterly, absolutely, existentially terrified. All that supposed energy and ambition, all the emphasis on achievement was, simply a way of shoring up the barricades, of constructing a fortress behind which I could shelter from the demons of depression and debilitating anxiety. By racking up points, coming out on top, winning the prizes, I kept the monsters at bay.

And then I had kids. And they didn't conform to schedules or slip neatly into file folders or abide by deadlines. My achievements dwindled.

And now I'm supposed to say--jauntily--that I learned of course that other things--motherhood and family, for example--were far more important and that I discovered that I was fine without the prizes, that I had no need of such defences because the demons never existed and the monsters were really cuddly toys.

Bullshit (she says politely).

With the barricades down, in hurtled the monsters. Depression rampaged through my life--slicing, slashing, gouging, biting-- and left me, my kids, my husband bleeding and scarred.

But the point is, as any fan of Doctor Who knows, monsters must be faced. You can't just cower behind the defenses you've erected and wait for the gnashing gashing hordes to go away. Because they don't. They just hunker down out there and eat a whole bunch and exercise a lot and get really strong. So you've got to go on the offensive; you have to fight. And here's where Doctor Who actually lets me down (hard to believe, but true). The Doctor makes the fight seem exciting, damn, even sexy. And it's not at least not when the monsters are depression and anxiety rather than space aliens. It's a fight that's boring and exhausting and goddamned fucking disillusioning and discouraging and just plain difficult. Much more like an episode from The Pacific.

So. Umm. I am not jaunty as I face 50. But I am, actually, hopeful. I mean, if you're hunkered down with the enemy all around you and yet you refuse to admit there's a fight going on, you haven't much chance of winning, do you? Oh, I know I'll probably lose all the same. Still, it's not so bad to go down fighting, is it? (she says, just a wee bit jauntily).

Surfacing

Marriage is so strange.

Keith was out of town the last several days, off at a conference in Nashville learning the latest on a vast federal government digital data homeless management program. Sounds riveting, doesn't it? The program is called something like the FFRSIP; when Keith and his colleagues and co-workers get together they speak in a jumble of acronyms and numerical codes:
"And then he demanded we input the HR47W6 in just 4 days!"
"Oh, I know, once--get this--once he called up on a Friday afternoon and said he had to have the 6Q14BR2 by Monday. Monday!"
"Well, at least it wasn't the 7Z14 BR2!"
Gales of knowing laughter.
I smile vaguely, glance at my watch, and count the wine glasses over the bar.

When we met, Keith was a campus minister: a college chaplain, except of course LSU is a public university and so does not and cannot have chaplains. Instead, the university campus serves as a kind of ship all around which cling, like barnacles, the buildings that house the various non-taxpayer-funded, not-at-all-official university campus ministries. There's the massive Roman Catholic student center and the just-as-massive-but-in-a-non-liturgical-sort-of-way-don't-you-dare-confuse-us-with-the-Catholics Baptist student center, and then a bunch of little buildings for all the fringe groups (this is Louisiana: if you're not Catholic or Baptist, you're fringe): the Episcopalians, the Lutherans, the Mormons, the Muslims, and the various non-denominational groups that in England would be called "happy-clappy." Hillel, the Jewish student group, has a presence on campus, but no actual building (tho' on Sukkot, a grass hut-like structure does appear in front of the Student Union).

Keith ran the what was then the ecumenical Methodist and Presbyterian student center--during his time, pretty much the only progressive Christian group on campus. A voice crying in the darkness. A tiny light, always threatened with extinction by the vast bushel of Southern fundamentalism, racism, homophobia, and, well, fear of anything "furrin'".

Back then, Keith did not speak in acronyms and numerical codes. Back then, he hated forms and regulations of any kind. He preached powerful sermons. He took students on work trips to Mexico. He served as administrator to the building that was a kind of liberal sanctuary: the meeting place for the Vegetarian Society, NOW, the Big Buddy program, the Quakers, Alcoholics Anonymous, the Progressive Student Alliance, the Coalition to Save the Wetlands, the Center for Peace and Justice, the Jazz Society. He comforted the lonely and gave shelter to the homeless and counseled the oppressed and depressed. When he talked about his work, I got it.

I don't get it anymore.

I get the importance of what he does: bringing in millions of dollars worth of funding for homeless prevention programs, working with all the various private and public agencies in town that deal with the homeless, liaising with federal, state, and local officials, helping devise policy and evaluate programs. And I get why he finds it so satisfying, after the formlessness, the lack of any concrete results, the utter futility of so much associated with mainline Protestantism today. But the day-to-day stuff, the answer to the question, "So, what did you do today?"--that, I do not get.

And that's weird for me. For us.

There's a part of me that's fine with it all. He's happy. He's challenged. He's satisfied. That's good. (The income? Not so good. But let's face it: I didn't marry this man for his money.) That part of me is ok with the vast gulf that now yawns between his professional life and mine, with the fact that if he actually tells me what he did today I have no idea what he's talking about and find it all really amazingly incredibly boring. Because basically I'm a loner. I'm pretty comfortable living in my head, on my own, just me and my fantasies and neuroses, with the occasional surfacing into human connection for a lovely meal, for sex, for a good laugh, and then the quick dive back down into me again.

But the thing is, that part of me, that's the dangerous part of me. The part that goes nutso.

There's another part. The part that values and nurtures and fights fiercely for community, for good solid friendships, for relationships built over time and negotiated through differences and tempered through hardship. When I married Keith, I chose this part of me, the good part, the connected part. Not the nutso, loner part.

So here we are. Keith has a job that is so good for him and for this community. He is making the world a better place. This world, our world, south Louisiana, this funky microcosm of earthly vulnerability. (As I write this, the BP oil spill threatens the coast, the region, the state, with utter disaster.)

And yet this job--this calling--of his also, as it happens, nurtures not only the structures that will/should end homelessness in our lifetime, it also feeds the worst part of me. The nutso, loner part.

And so, here's The Question. Does a Woman Facing 50 say, "Oh Husband o' Mine, stop doing good in the world. Stop doing what you were born to do. Because, see, well, if I stay under too long, I just might not be able to find my way to the surface."

Marriage is so strange.