Resolution

I have a problem with maintenance. I’m working on it. I told this to my therapist last week and she nodded sagely. She often nods sagely and I love that about her. She is proof that I’m working on my problem with maintenance. I guess ‘maintenance’ isn’t quite the right term. Or maybe it’s that not doing maintenance is the manifestation of my real fear which is a fear of *knowing*. If you don’t check under the hood, if you don’t get the test, if you don’t look too carefully, if you don’t ask the right question…then you don’t really have to know. At least for a while. Until it blows up in your face. Which it inevitably does. You know those moments you have before you learn something that shatters you? I think about those moments in my life. They were mundane. They wouldn’t have been memorable except for what came afterwards. In 1988, in my friend’s car after a night of playing Nintendo and swimming in her sister’s pool. Pulling up to my house and laughing our goodbyes before realizing there was an ambulance in my driveway. In 1999, a phone conversation with my beloved grandfather that ended with a promise to see me soon and an “I love you, stop worrying about me.” In 2000, watching my husband walk out the door with a basketball and an “Eat dinner without me, I’ll be home in a couple of hours.” Again in 2000, a fucking devastating year I still haven’t recovered from, at a Halloween party where a man I’d briefly dated was being friendly to me instead of the usual hostility he’d shown since I’d told him I didn’t want to date him, and I was stupidly relieved and happy to accept the drink he handed me. I didn’t think I’d ever be so blissfully ignorant again. My problems with maintenance were intensified after that. I couldn’t relax, I always felt unsafe and unmoored. If I heard a rattle in the car, I turned up the radio. If there was a problem in my apartment, I moved. I had eight addresses in four years. I became petrified of going to the doctor or dentist, because what if there was a problem I couldn’t handle? When all the worst things keep happening, how can you trust that the sky isn’t about to fall on you every time you leave the house? How can you risk hearing somebody tell you that things are even worse than you feared? What if you just can’t handle ANYTHING ELSE? Better to ignore any issues, because sometimes issues just go away! After four years of living by that sensible philosophy, I met someone with whom I didn’t feel alone. That was new for me. I got married again and had my sons. Weirdly, that started to steady me. It doesn’t work that way for everyone, I know. Kids aren’t exactly a calming force, but somehow, they grounded me. I still wasn’t thrilled about maintenance, but I went to the doctor. I got my car fixed. It’s best have to have a working body and car with kids. It’s good to take your kids to the doctor, too. So I did. I sunk into it for a while. I don’t know if I ever got comfortable. And yet…it hit me like a goddamn truck when the blissful ignorance of my marriage was shattered in an artfully decorated hotel room in Manhattan with a view of big wet snowflakes in the air and ballet dancers practicing in the building across from us. I left the room an hour later to walk alone in that beautiful city in the falling snow, knowing that the life I had before was over forever and I would have to do something and tell someone and ask someone to help me, but all I could do was walk for a while and feel the snow and remember that I was still breathing and my heart was still beating. It’s important to know those things. Sometimes you don’t need to know anything else. So. That was almost three years ago. Maintenance has been difficult for me again in those years. I haven’t been to the dentist in forever, I ignore my doctor at all costs, I have a plumbing problem in my shower and a toilet that needs you to lift the lid in order to stop it from running. Also my car is ten years old and has a lot of hazard lights that are always illuminated on the dash. I ignored grindy brake sounds until I needed to get a complete new set of brakes. A ridiculously expensive consequence, yet it still didn’t cure me of the maintenance problem. But this year is the year. I told my therapist (and therapy is totally maintenance, so I’m not a total failure in this regard) and now I’m telling you. My 2018 resolution is to get check-ups and get things fixed. To ask the questions and find out what I need to know to solve the problems. To know that I am strong enough to handle the answers and resourceful enough to find the solutions. I’ve got this.