Mondays with Niko

For almost one year  now Niko and I have been going to yoga class, then finding a coffee shop and quiet place to di writing for at least an hour and sometimes more than that.. At the end of the year, we'll pull together what we've written--see what we have. Our idea is that if we don't set aside this time, we'll never to it on our own. Today we sit in the lobby of a very posh hotel. We have paid $4 each for an Americano, which makes us thankful that we brought our own pumpkin bread and apple. We're in front of a wide fireplace that has flames coming from crystals--behind it is a window and we see outside to a fountain burbling water up and over a brass sculpture that I cant describe--lots of angles, perhaps representing leaves. It is all very elegant and only a little out of place in this town known best for its laid-back, outdoor, mountaineering life style.

Last week we met, but did not write. Our whole time  last Monday was spent talking. I was just back from Paris, so we had missed some time together. But Paris was not what we talked about--rather, our children and the anxiety we feel for them long after they have become adults, have been out of our houses for a while, and are leading their own lives. It started, of course, with my telling Niko about my grief over Jesse's death and for his parents. It's the same response as I mentioned before. We become very quiet, afraid to dpeak some things out loud, thinking of our own children and there but for the grace of  God, Allah, the beneficent beings of tghe universe, go we.  The death of a child, the most horrific of imaginings, brings out any fear we have of putting that out in the universe--the mere discussion of it resonating at some celestial level--the power of the word--the spoken word-- to emerge into a thing, into a dreaded reality. Interestingly, we find that power absolutely impotent when we put positive thoughts out there--we tend to scorn at that a bit more--as if only the negative has some power over us to fulfill itself in the reality of our lives.

A concern over a breakup, a child in constant pain because of an accident, abuse--even the children whose lives are smooth for the moment-we find ourselves waking at night with a pang and a pit in the stomach. Where are those years when we could make everything all right with a kiss, soothing words, and a cookie?

As I've said to my friend whose son is cultivating marijuana for medicinal purposes, has just become a father, has been busted, "They're ont heir own journey." It's my mantra.  Lord know that when I was 32, 49, 51---the age of my children now--Lord knows I would have never gone to my mother with any kind of pain; she didn't want to hear about it, and I took that for her uncaring, but frankly, it could very well have been that she cared too much.

A therapist once asked me, when I was grieving over my inability to protect my children from this savage and broken world, "Do you think your children are not as able as you are to endure what happens to us in life?" No, not really. But it's not too much to wish that they didn't have to.