Survival Strategies
So many years ago. At 40 I took the trip I should have taken in my twenties. But instead I got married then. It was not a bad marriage. But one I had to survive to get to the next place. The strategies then were of mixed results. Cooking, having sex when my husband came home for lunch. Even if my mind was on dinner. Up in the middle of the night with warm milk and graham crackers. Sometimes I was happy enough considering that even just before our wedding I considered calling the whole thing off. I did, 4 years later.
I spent the next number of years moving and dancing and having sex at all hours of the day and night. Approaching 40, wanting desperately to become a mother, I left my ambivalent boyfriend and traveled the continent.
Survival strategies…traveling alone for the first time in my life out of the country. With a round trip ticket that had me veering about for 2 1/2 months. In Switzerland, in the German part, it was less common to see a woman traveling alone. In order to survive what felt like the disapproval of diners to see an unaccompanied, female foreigner, I slowly drank a glass of wine and wrote in my journal. Writing then was a survival strategy. I could disappear into my aloneness and find strength and who cared what they thought.
On the train through Germany, heading for Austria. Looking outside to the forested land, I could only think of Jews running ..away from Nazis and vicious dogs and certain death or imprisonment. My survival technique when police boarded the train in the middle of the night to check passports was to sit among the group of young travelers who had adopted me for the brief journey. Quiet. I showed my passport and resisted imagining they would see I was Jewish and pull me from the train. Sometimes my imagination takes me right out of the present.
In Poland I met up with George. A friend's ex. And my traveling companion for a few days. Considering we didn't know each other very well, we survived a few awkward days together. At least I got to hike the border and venture into the countryside.
Often it was about eating. Immersing myself in a menu and practicing my Italian with handsome waiters. Loneliness was unavailable if I was eating pastry or pasta. And the coffee! I think Italians are truly happy because they have the best coffee in the world.
Hiking in Switzerland I almost crossed a rushing river. I don't know why I stopped. Was I remembering Betsy who at 16 tripped and fell and hit her head and drowned? Her parents such close friends of my parents. Meeting the family when I spent a summer in Cambridge at Harvard summer school. Betsy and I met for the first time. She told her Mom that if anything ever happened to them, she would want me to be her Mom. I was a sophomore in college. What did I know then about being anyone's mother?
They all went camping and then there was the fatal accident. I spent days at their home. Passing pastries and offering tea. Included in the Shiva as if I really had been her mother.
That same summer there with Charles, whose wife was very sick. I don't even know how we met. He included me in his group of friends. We never had sex, but somehow I comforted him.
Caretaking of others…is that one of my survival strategies? It takes me away from my fear and worry. I focus outside of myself. I get distracted and I forget, momentarily, the fear. Lots of therapy to come back to myself. To stop considering others in lieu of staging my own survival. Or is it that I want to thrive? Survive to thrive…some rhyme here…maybe a song lyric?
I have stopped running, for the most part. No sex with virtual strangers. Less need to bury myself in the needs of others. To make them feel comfortable even if I am not. Well, at least not most of the time.