AMY ELLIOTT DUNNE

APRIL 28, 2011

– Diary entry –

Just got to keep on keeping on, that’s what Mama Mo says, and when she says it – her sureness, each word emphasized, as if it really were a viable life strategy – the cliche´ stops being a set of words and turns into something real. Valuable. Keep on keeping on, exactly! I think.

I do love that about the Midwest: People don’t make a big deal about everything. Not even death. Mama Mo will just keep on keeping on until the cancer shuts her down, and then she will die.

So I’m keeping my head down and making the best of a bad situation, and I mean that in the deep, literal Mama Mo usage. I keep my head down and do my work: I drive Mo to doctor’s appointments and chemo appointments. I change the sickly water in the flower vase in Nick’s father’s room, and I drop off cookies for the staff so they take good care of him.

I’m making the best of a really bad situation, and the situation is mostly bad because my husband, who brought me here, who uprooted me to be closer to his ailing parents, seems to have lost all interest in both me and said ailing parents.

Nick has written off his father entirely: He won’t even say the man’s name. I know every time we get a phone call from Comfort Hill, Nick is hoping it’s the announcement that his dad is dead. As for Mo, Nick sat with his mom during a single chemo session and pronounced it unbearable. He said he hated hospitals, he hated sick people, he hated the slowly ticking time, the IV bag dripping molasses-slow. He just couldn’t do it. And when I tried to talk him back into it, when I tried to stiffen his spine with some gotta do what you gotta do, he told me to do it. So I did, I have. Mama Mo, of course, takes on the burden of his blame. We sat one day, partly watching a romantic comedy on my computer but mostly chatting, while the IV dripped … so … slowly, and as the spunky heroine tripped over a sofa, Mo turned to me and said, ‘Don’t be too hard on Nick. About not wanting to do this kind of thing. I just always doted on him, I babied him – how could you not? That face. And so he has trouble doing hard things. But I truly don’t mind, Amy. Truly.’

‘You should mind,’ I said.

‘Nick doesn’t have to prove his love for me,’ she said, patting my hand. ‘I know he loves me.’

I admire Mo’s unconditional love, I do. So I don’t tell her what I have found on Nick’s computer, the book proposal for a memoir about a Manhattan magazine writer who returns to his Missouri roots to care for both his ailing parents. Nick has all sorts of bizarre things on his computer, and sometimes I can’t resist a little light snooping – it gives me a clue as to what my husband is thinking. His search history gave me the latest: noir films and the website of his old magazine and a study on the Mississippi River, whether it’s possible to free-float from here to the Gulf. I know what he pictures: floating down the Mississippi, like Huck Finn, and writing an article about it. Nick is always looking for angles.

I was nosing through all this when I found the book proposal.

Double Lives: A Memoir of Ends and Beginnings will especially resonate with Gen X males, the original man-boys, who are just beginning to experience the stress and pressures involved with caring for aging parents. In Double Lives, I will detail:

The proposal was never completed, I assume because Nick realized he wasn’t going to ever understand his once-distant father; and because Nick was shirking all ‘head of the family’ duties; and because I wasn’t expressing any anger about my new life. A little frustration, yes, but no book-worthy rage. For so many years, my husband has lauded the emotional solidity of midwesterners: stoic, humble, without affectation! But these aren’t the kinds of people who provide good memoir material. Imagine the jacket copy: People behaved mostly well and then they died.

Still, it stings a bit, ‘the resentment my Manhattanite wife feels.’ Maybe I do feel … stubborn. I think of how consistently lovely Maureen is, and I worry that Nick and I were not meant to be matched. That he would be happier with a woman who thrills at husband care and homemaking, and I’m not disparaging these skills: I wish I had them. I wish I cared more that Nick always has his favorite toothpaste, that I know his collar size off the top of my head, that I am an unconditionally loving woman whose greatest happiness is making my man happy.

I was that way, for a while, with Nick. But it was unsustainable. I’m not selfless enough. Only child, as Nick points out regularly.

But I try. I keep on keeping on, and Nick runs around town like a kid again. He’s happy to be back in his rightful prom-king place – he dropped about ten pounds, he got a new haircut, he bought new jeans, he looks freakin’ great. But I only know that from the glimpses of him coming home or going back out, always in a pretend hurry. You wouldn’t like it, his standard response any time I ask to come with him, wherever it is he goes. Just like he jettisoned his parents when they were of no use to him, he’s dropping me because I don’t fit in his new life. He’d have to work to make me comfortable here, and he doesn’t want to do that. He wants to enjoy himself.

Stop it, stop it. I must look on the bright side. Literally. I must take my husband out of my dark shadowy thoughts and shine some cheerful golden light on him. I must do better at adoring him like I used to. Nick responds to adoration. I just wish it felt more equal. My brain is so busy with Nick thoughts, it’s a swarm inside my head: Nicknicknicknicknick! And when I picture his mind, I hear my name as a shy crystal ping that occurs once, maybe twice, a day and quickly subsides. I just wish he thought about me as much as I do him.

Is that wrong? I don’t even know anymore.