Portrait in Linen

I know it’s hard for him to put on a brave face.  Parents are capable of walking through fire to preserve their kids.  I know it’s hard for him because it’s excruciating for me.  Not when they’re making jokes that put us in stitches, and not when they’re basking in the glory of a triumphant performance.

It’s hard when they’re on stage, and the two of us stand together watching them, and I’m thinking of behind-the-scenes tragedy and how fragile is the scaffolding and how delicate is the balance.

It’s hard when we’re out in public, walking through the sea of faces, offering up “hellos” and “how-ya-doin’s” and I really don’t feel it at all.  I’m thinking of territorial residue that’s molding between the joints and cultivating a hazardous anger, unjustly resenting all the other women because they’re women and they represent the seed of this particular strain of strife.  Furious with myself because I know how unjustified it is to feel this way–I know better….

But that’s the nature of the pain: unfocused, indiscriminate, irrational.  And then I’m angry about that, too: yet another part of myself wrenched out of my hands, another aspect of my personality I can hold up to the cold, unforgiving light of self-criticism–because I’m imbalanced, I can’t get a-hold of myself, I let all of this infiltrate so that it’s not about him anymore, but about what I’m not, which is Enough.

Not fair.  Not fair.  I feel like the assassinated, but really, I’m a secondary casualty.