The Nurse’s Lament
The following is an excerpt from the novel The Burden of Joy, out this fall from Rejection Letters Press.
The man I’m with tells me I’m a giver and he’s a taker, that he won’t be able to stop taking from me, so I should stop giving to him. He calls me a nurturer. He's the first person to call me this. It’s the most immediate, identifiable trait of mine that others see, but I had no idea despite my three decades inhabiting the role.
I consider the evidence.
Within two hours of meeting my ex-husband I was sewing a hole in his pants. I told this story for twelve years. I wore it like a crown. I wanted everyone to hear the sweetness of when we met and he needed something and my helping hands were doing it for him before we even knew each other’s last names.
When my friends’ three-year-old daughter wakes up from her nap, I’m the first adult she sees when she walks out of her bedroom. She asks me to help her on the toilet. She runs to the kitchen to announce it to her parents: “She wiped my bottom!” They redden, embarrassed, before instructing her to thank me and telling me I didn’t have to help. It didn’t occur to me that I didn’t have to do it. I’d been mortified that I wasn't thinking a step ahead to assist when she first stumbled into the bathroom.
For years I made nurturing my career. I took care of famous women, famous millionaires. They needed help with scheduling, picking up dry cleaning, pumping gas, grocery shopping, wrapping gifts, remembering to eat. They had access to everything in the world, but what they actually needed was a comrade, a peanut gallery, a friend who couldn’t leave until they were told. Years later, I still dream of assuaging their anxieties. I wake up wishing I could have done more for them, remembering when I couldn’t shield them from their own self-esteem, their insular disadvantages, their incredibly specific circumstances.
The nurturers never become the nurtured. When we need it, it doesn’t come. I need it now, but nobody knows what to do. They love to tell me how strong I am, as though staying alive is so brave. If I choose the alternative, does that make me weak or scared or whatever the opposite is of brave? But there is no choice. I don’t choose to be brave or strong. And I don’t feel any of those traits I’m being assigned. Gravity pulls harder every day, though more often now it feels like I’m being pushed towards the ground instead of pulled.
When I had someone, people always asked how he was first before asking me, “How are you?” Now that I’m alone and have no partner for them to ask me about, they instead start conversations with “My coworker is getting divorced,” as if it’s the only way to relate to me anymore. As if it’s the totality of who I am now. They skip the how-are-yous altogether. Nobody wants to be near someone that makes them unsure of whether this could happen to them. If I mention my ex-husband they become visibly tense, like I should know we don’t speak of the living dead.
Loneliness is a necessary alienation. I can’t face anyone when I don't know what to tell them, admit what’s happening, or say it out loud. And now days go by when the only humans I interact with are ghost hands waving through windshields as neighbors drive past me. The glare on the glass makes it impossible to see their faces. I crave smelling my dog’s breath because it’s the only scent that belongs to someone else.
Last night I dreamt a mountain lion stalked into a room I was lying down in, its tail whipping devilishly, erratically. It laid down behind me and put its head on my neck. I should have been scared, but I was so grateful to be touched that I didn’t have any fear.
I feel others on my body in different places. It takes time for me to learn who it is. I feel my ex-husband in my sinuses. I feel The Taker in my eyes, my breath, and my fingers. What good is my body if not a shrine to those I love? A vessel for their needs and desires, a sacrifice for their woes and pains. My body becomes a decorated tomb, with marks to, for, by, and because of those I’ve loved.
I receive gifts of bubble bath, creams and oils, spa gift cards. As though the creams and oils are a cure-all salve for more than wrinkles. I accept the gifts with performances of gratitude, dutifully carrying an open heart and mind as I use them. The massages end every single time with me in tears. My body, this shrine to those I love, can’t accept this one-way touch, directed solely towards me. There’s not an exchange, so it feels foreign and mistaken.
It’s a dangerous hobby, keeping track of others. Knowing them better than they know themselves, better than you know yourself. Intellectually I know this: don’t keep people as hobbies. Keep them as friends and lovers. Don’t keep strange things, like a piece of rubber from the sole of my ex-husband’s shoe that lives on my nightstand, or the list of things that make The Taker do a little dance. Let some things happen without keeping a record. Without turning it into your possession.
Months after my ex-husband leaves, the cobbler at the shoe repair stand eventually asks, tenderly, “Not married anymore?” as he rings up my pair of boots he’s fixed.
“Not anymore,” I affirm, matching his tone. “How did you know?”
“You stopped bringing his shoes and belts to fix.”
Don’t fix their things. Let them fix their own things.