Sea Wife

Because love is tidal; it goes out, it comes in, it goes out.

Everyone is hard to love, if you do it for long enough.

Here’s what I want to say to the other side, to the Righteous Left, to the Easily Injured and Offended: You say you want concessions/changes/social justice, but let’s admit it, you are never going to quit.

Complaining is a form of taking.

Every marriage needs one skeptic to keep it safe. But a marriage of two skeptics will fail to thrive.

We’re just a hyphen between our parents and our kids. That’s what you learn in middle age. Mostly this is something a mature person can live with. But every once in a while you just want to send up a flare. I too am here! Everybody is sympathetic until you try and make your minuscule life interesting and then they’re like, What’s wrong with you? You think you’re special?

I’m not “depressed,” she said. Besides, I hate that word. OK, what should we call it? She fluffed the pillow behind her back, indignant. I’m very faithful to my problems.

Until I sailed, I never would have known that children could be so brave. Which is not to say they did not whine at sea, that they did not cry at the worst times, or need their crusts cut just so, but as it turned out, they had a deep capacity for witness. In a way that I could not, they became the sea, they became the swamp. Their experience was total, without footnote. That day in the swamp, I felt unaccountably happy for them, and for myself as a child, because I knew that I must have been that way once too. I remembered the loss of childhood too well. But I often forgot the long years it was mine.

Sailing is repairing a boat in exotic places.

I’m very faithful to my problems

You make your way. You handle it. You don’t wait around for a savior. You don’t allow yourself to be a victim. And when all else fails, you make a joke.

I’ve lived my whole life with a land mind. Thinking land thoughts. But I want to think sea thoughts. I want to have a sea mind.

This is it. This is what a life is. A journey with no signposts. The seas roll out in every direction. There but for the grace of God.

We come from nothing & return to nothing, but in between we're supposed to lead lives of grace and courage?

It’s tiring to carry the weight of eternally unsaid words.

I live in fear of making an honest mistake in conversation followed by some kind of Maoist-style recrimination session.

We argue, but we never change each other’s minds. We only get farther apart.

Do you ever wonder where school buses go to die? I’ll tell you! They go to Central America, where they are tricked out, painted & forced to climb mountain roads picking up anyone w/ their thumb out. When I boarded the chicken bus in Sabanitas this p.m., it was already full. No one batted an eye as I snuggled in w/ 5 sacks of groceries. I could feel the exact shape & cup size of the breasts of the woman standing behind me, but she didn’t seem to mind. Then her breasts were replaced by the hard belly of a gentleman who’d given up his seat. Had to struggle not to fall forward into the man in front of me, who stood holding onto nothing like Jesus as we tore through the one-lane roads back down the other side of the mountain.

Look at the care we take w/ our secrets, when we're so sloppy w/ everything else.

I could never give it a name, my condition. I would have said, "I'm depressed," if that had felt sufficient. But I felt more than depressed. I felt that I was depression. A swallowed woman.

After Georgie, something had changed in our marriage, and there was nowhere solid to put the blame. We were almost forty, and simultaneously our marriage had - I don' know - thickened, agglutinated, become oatmeal-like. Differences between us that had once provided sparks now seemed inefficient. Was there love? Yes, yes - but at the margins. At the center, there was administration.

We say we want kids to be joyful/unmaterialistic/resilient. That’s what sailing kids are like. They climb masts & can correctly identify obscure plant life. They don’t care what somebody looks like when they meet them, they sometimes don’t even speak the same language, but they work it out. They don’t sit around ranking one kind of life against another.

He leaned down & he said, Michael, I will tell you honestly because you’ve been honest with me, that what you want is a holy human right, and you shouldn’t just give it up. I humored him. I said, What right, Harry? The right to feel the burden of carrying your own life. Just you and your family and your boat. No crutches, no excuses.

Fair, what a useless word. A concept that is relevant only in the rare moments when there is no greater danger than unfairness.

You think this will solve all our problems. It’s magical thinking, Michael. It’s the way a child thinks.

Michael and I both recognized we had problems, we just couldn’t agree on the solution. I think what was happening was, I wasn’t just talking about the implausible plan to walk away from our house and the kids’ schools and Michael’s job, no matter how assured we would be of getting these things back. I was wondering, whether we were to go or to stay, what would we do— about us?

Where does a mistake begin?” his wife asks at the start of the book. “Did my mistake begin with the boat? Or my marriage itself?

Fatigue overtakes me, and a grief so concentrated I swim in it. A grief that makes my arms heavy. A grief that makes my back slump. A grief that makes me close my eyes. I want to sleep like the unborn and the dead. I want to sleep so deeply that I see him again. I want to confront him. Who were you? I want to say. Why do you talk to me now? I want to shake his inert body. But what’s the use? Our losses will never be done with us. They have endless patience.