Happy Part II

Today my agent called to say I booked an episode of NBC's Trauma. I shoot a week from today, a small small part, but a part on a network TV show none-the-less.

As I am walking through the day, I keep finding myself skipping and squeaking out, "Whee!"

Well, will you look at that. Happy.

Happy

I think, when I was fifteen, I was really happy. I had made it through three years at a new school and had made a small but tight set of friends there who understood and loved me for the quirky little weirdo I was. I had found my way to dance and theatre. That year I played Judah in Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat, one of the best theatrical experiences I have had to date. I finally convinced Mom and Dad to send me to arts camp and spent a blissful, independent summer singing and dancing and acting my little heart out at Carnegie Mellon pre-college program. And that same summer I finally grew my hair out, and discovered, By George, I actually had the kind of hair I was coveting in others. I was far enough away from college not to worry about it yet, far enough away from childhood to start to call my own shots. I felt pretty and powerful and, well, happy.

I think I may have also been very happy when I was 22 or so. I had launched out of college, finally given in to my artistic soul and moved to NYC to pursue a life of debauchery and sin. I had made a deal with my parents: I give them a major in something other than theatre and they would give me a year of "grad school" in NYC. I had done my research, picked my voice teachers, dance classes, acting studios, clowning and Peking Opera workshops (can't you just feel my parents rolling their eyes), and was in the middle of my funded year, living with three thirty-something roommates in their railroad style apartment on the Upper West Side. I was a terrible roommate: I left my dishes in the sink and had loud visitors, and I don't even think I knew where they kept the broom or mop. And I didn't care. I joined an improv troupe and got paid to make things up in front of live audiences twice a week, and I was beginning to pick up a nasty tutoring habit that I still haven't kicked to this day. Happy.

I mention these times, because they stand in stark contrast to my life right now. It is not that I am miserable all the time, but I live with the constant weight of unfulfilled yearning and of failure. Even on vacation, Bruno and I felt the heaviness of our missing sons and our failure to continue our family. We watch people all around us, with varying degrees of ease, get pregnant, have children. And we carry, all the time, the pain of not knowing whether that grace will ever be bestowed on us again. We exist with the buzz of that worry and our loss always in the background, like a computer doing some task behind the scenes and making everything else happen more slowly, with more glitches. Hobbled, drained of power. Unhappy.

My guess is that the trick of life is finding happiness, or at least peace, in the in betweens. I am terribly weak at this. I am an achiever. So is Bruno. We are beside ourselves trying to figure out how to go on in this arena in which we have no control whatsoever. I have no answers here, no solutions, but it does feel nice to remember times in my life when I was really happy, and try to imagine that there will be times like that again.

People and Things We Love

To all the wonderful people who wrote comments or have written me privately to check up on me after my last post: Thank you so much. Thank you for understanding, for supporting the need to rant and rave, for knowing it is not my all, not my sum, only my some.

We have skipped town. Left the building. Flown the country, actually: we are in Vancouver.

It is a perfect and curious place for us to take a vacation. Perfect, because it is filled with all the things we love: snow-capped mountains to view while hiking through them, coastlines dotted with islands to kayak around, a city full of fantastic foodie food, parks to bike in, sights to see, harrowing, scenic drives to navigate at questionable speeds, ferries to ride, and Starwood hotels to stay in for free. Curious, because it is the Pacific Northwest, the place where we most got to know, and then lose our boys. Seattle, Olympic National Park, the Northern coast of Oregon and then ultimately Portland: these were final frontiers for us, the places that haunt our dreams and quiet moments. I have gone over and over those last upright days, searching for clues, trolling for blame amidst the cool air of evergreen forests, jagged mountain ranges, the rainforest lushness that is so prevalent up here and that causes in me both a surge of great love and a profound melancholy. Bruno has the added memories of Portland proper, an outside that I never saw, not until it was all over.

And so we push ourselves to integrate: to continue enjoying the things we love in the kind of places we love, and encorporate our memories of the boys we love and so wish we hadn't lost. We hike and we talk, and Bruno fumes and I weep, and then we keep hiking. We keep climbing the mountains and traversing the oceans and flying over the things in our way to get to the things we love.

Bitch

I am becoming a person I don't want to be: snappish and bitter and not happy for other peoples' happiness. I am sick of people who are on their 18th child but still talk about their "trying to conceive" trouble, I am sick of women who get sneezed on by their husbands and get pregnant, I am sick of stories of people who had an "opps". I am sick of disappointment, sick of being scared I will never have a child. I am sick of being almost 39, sick of having lost my sons, sick of having had miscarriages, sick of failing when all the odds that we can stack are stacked in our favor. I am sick of people implying that if I just ignored the Drs and went on vacation and drank wine we would of course get pregnant. I am sick of fearing my house, sick of fearing the moist Bay Area, sick of fearing MOLD, I am sick of pitching myself as a tutor, sick of only being able to approach acting in a half in half out way. I am sick of wanting and not having, I am sick of limbo, I am sick of sadness. I am sick of getting older, I am sick of having to care about my age. I wouldn't care about my age at all if I didn't have to think about eggs and ovaries. I am sick of being childless, I am sick of being a bitch inside my own head and bitter inside my own heart. I am capable of being a very happy person. I am sick of being a very unhappy person.

Passing the Time

Spent the afternoon at Mom and Dad's house in the backyard listening to their fountain burble, knitting with my Mom. It was fabulous. So fabulous, that when it came time to head home and make the zucchini and corn thing I was planning for dinner, I called Bruno instead and said, "meet me at Mom and Dad's: we'll order pastrami!" And he did, and we did, and OK, it wasn't NY pastrami, but it wasn't zucchini either!

Prophetic Comment, or Invitation to Eat Less Ice-Cream?

Yesterday, as I was walking through the streets of San Francisco on my way to an audition, a homeless man walking toward me stopped dead in the street, looked me up and down, and then announced, "It's a boy! And it's beautiful!".

From his mouth to.......

Without a Net

Last night I dreamt I was on a highway trying to get somewhere, and the highway kept splitting off in all these different directions. And somehow they would all lead to the same place, they were just different options with different terrains, some better suited for trucks, some for motorcycles, etc.

I had no idea which route I was supposed to take, and I kept making choices and was totally fearful that I was choosing routes that weren't best for me, or would take much longer, etc. And all the while I was moving forward at great speeds with no time really to make these decisions.

Right before I woke up, I had chosen a route that was leading me on a very very steep road, practically vertical, and the route was called The Wire, and I suspected that at the top of the climb I was somehow going to have to drive on a thin wire. I was concentrating on the asphalt in front of me, but I was becoming very very worried about what, exactly, The Wire meant, and whether I would be able to traverse it.