There's a mouse in my (empty) house
There's a mouse in my (empty) house.
On the Friday of Labor Day weekend, I was exercising down in my basement when a mouse darted across the floor a few feet away from where I was squatting up and down holding a weight. I started to scream as the rodent slipped under a nearby wire rack that holds – among other things, more rolls of paper towels than one person could probably use in a year – and threw the weight on the ground.
“Amy, it’s just a mouse,” came the deep voice of my trainer, Dan, from my phone propped up by a 12-pound weight on a small metal table. Imagine having Sylvester Stallone – before all the horrible plastic surgery – talking to you about the evils of sugar as you struggle through 30 more push-ups, and that describes the man I’ve been working out with for almost 10 years. Before fitness, Dan had spent 15 years as a corrections officer and transitioned from dealing with inmates to training the Wall Streeters who live around here. Sometimes when he tells stories from his past (and he’s got some doozies) it’s hard to tell which is the more difficult population to work with—rapists, murderers or the one percent.
“They’re just like bad backs, everybody’s got ‘em,” Dan said about my mouse from the comfort of his basement an hour away as I watched the rodent emerge from under the rack and then scurry back to safety. I screamed a lot and eventually grabbed a bunch of weights and Dan on my phone to head upstairs and turned into the stairwell where I found the dumb mouse hanging out on the bottom step. “Are you waiting for me to make you some breakfast or something?” I screamed as the rodent as it hopped off the step and ran.
Dan tried to reason with me for the rest of our session, but I was too rattled to listen to what he had to say. He told me to go to Home Depot and get some traps and put a lot of peanut butter on them and that would be the end of it. “But I’d still have to get rid of it,” I yelled at him. I love Dan and respect how he’s used the challenges in his life to be a better person – which included a near-fatal brush with cancer – but sometimes he can be a real know-it-all.
I was already a bit unhinged in the days leading up to the holiday weekend. That Tuesday I was walking the dog around the block before bedtime and thought, “This is it for my entire life,” and slipped down a rabbit hole of despair.
The youngest of my four children had left for college about two weeks earlier and for about 10 days, I embraced my solitude the way Tom Hanks sucked the juice from that coconut in Castaway, when he finally figured out how to crack it open. I listened to my music on full blast, organized my office and reveled in how tidy my house was with just me and a dog as its full-time inhabitants.
But then I walked the dog that one night and realized the permanence of the situation – my three older children have moved out and begun their own lives and my baby is away for the next three months – and went home and got into bed and started to cry.
And I kept crying. All that week I could feel that lump in my throat. The tears standing ready to prick my eyes at a moment’s notice.
"For the first time in my adult life, all the distractions have been eliminated and the truth of my life is in full view."
Since my marriage ended over a decade ago, holidays have been hard. They put a magnifying glass over my aloneness, which I’m usually perfectly fine with. But somehow seeing a holiday looming on the calendar starts to pick at the scab of sadness that always seems just about healed, until an innocuous long weekend makes it start to bleed again.
I could feel the emotions start to churn after that dog walk. I went to an all-women’s recovery meeting one night after work and shared in a shaky voice with the 25 women gathered in a circle on folding chairs that I was afraid I was going to die alone. After the meeting I found myself surrounded by the group’s elders, who shared their own stories of sending kids off to college and the loneliness and sorrow they suffered. One tiny woman, about 25 years my senior, kept repeating that I was going to be okay. “You know why?” she said, looking around our small circle, “because she’s willing.”
One of the nicest things about working a program of recovery is the free counseling that comes with it as well as your own personal advisor. The writer Anne Lamott refers to her sponsor as her “spiritual advisor” and calls her “Horrible Bonnie,” because she’s just so good. I wish I had come up with that moniker because it would be perfect for my sponsor, too. She knew how hard I was struggling with the Labor Day weekend and kept checking in and telling me the next best thing to do. That Friday was particularly hard for me and she invited me over and we did a little recovery work but mostly we sat in friendship until it was time for me to go home and go to bed.
Once I got over the hump of Friday, I was fine. I went to another lovely meeting Saturday morning and later met some girlfriends on the beach for a few hours and when they packed up I stayed for a bit and read. The next day I met one of those same women to go out on the river for a while on paddleboards. I’d bought an inflatable one from Costco at the beginning of the summer because I figured it was the cheapest and easiest way for me to get on the water, which always calms me down.
Nowadays, I don’t even bother standing up when I paddle – or kneeling, for that matter. It hurts my knees and feet. I just sit on my butt like I’m on a kayak and mosey through the water, which is what my girlfriend and I did that Sunday. It was overcast but still warm out and we moved against the breeze across the river and then slowed down to putter along the shore, pointing to the egrets standing along the edge in the tall grass and one perched up high in a nearby tree.
This friend just passed the one-year marker of her breast cancer diagnosis, so between her journey through chemo and surgery and me and my path to recovery from drinking too damn much, the talk was pretty real as we paddled side-by-side past the docks pushing out into the river.
“Listen to the sounds,” she said, and I pulled my paddle from the water and laid it across my lap, and listened to the river. Then I untangled my crisscrossed legs and laid back on the board and closed my eyes to hear the whir of cicadas, the squawking of birds overhead, the sound of the water gently hitting my board. We both laid flat like that for a while, in communion with everything around us, filling our hungry souls.
When I saw Dan again the following week, he asked about the mouse and I reported the exterminator finally came the day before and put down some poison for my houseguest to enjoy. Hopefully, this mouse has the courtesy to go outside to die, unlike the mouse I had over the winter who slinked into my basement closet jam-packed with holiday decorations to perish and stunk the place up for a month.
I told Dan that it wasn’t just the mouse that had me so worked up, but what it represented and he asked me to explain.
“That I’m lonely,” I told him. For the first time in my life, I am on my own and it’s really, really weird. Dinners are a strange amalgamation of leftovers I pull out of the frig to heat up in my air fryer and I can’t nag anyone about crap that’s piled up somewhere because now it’s all my crap.
For the first time in my adult life, all the distractions have been eliminated and the truth of my life is in full view. No more busy kids’ schedules, meal planning, or others’ many and varied needs to attend to. And frankly, there’s also no more alcohol to slip into every night to avoid facing the harsh realities of my romantic and financial status. Now it’s just me, a dog and a lot of focus on who I am, what I want and what I’d really like my life to look like.
That dumb mouse, who had the nerve to leave a tiny turd on my kitchen windowsill next to the tomatoes I pulled from my garden as its parting salvo, reminded me that I’m the only one here. To clear the clutter and walk the dog and get rid of the bodies. And the holiday weekend pressed down hard on a wound I’ve been lugging around for a very long time.
I know that where I am right now is not only a privilege, but it’s right where I’m supposed to be. Lying in my bed talking to God and asking for strength. Walking my dog along the sidewalks in my neighborhood on a warm summer night under a perfect sliver of a moon. Listening to the secrets of the river as I float along in its current.
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SUNDAY SHARES: Read, watch, cook, buy
First, I want to thank everyone who took time out of their busy lives to respond to my survey. It really helps inform what I'm doing and how I can do it better. Also, you guys are really awesome and said some really nice things. Did you mean to respond and then got lost in some email from Nordstrom? I feel you. There's still time to put it your two cents and tell me whether you'd be willing to support my efforts through come kind of subscription.
If I could, I would slice my entire life up and divvy it into Ziploc bags. It's how I travel, save little doodads in my junk drawer and even replace a diaper bag after I got over the whole thing with Kid #4. I grabbed a big assortment of these pretty Ziplocs at Costco and will make use of them for an upcoming getaway.
Lately, I feel like when I walk into my house it smells like a musty antique store. Me no like. My sister's place, on the other hand, smells like heaven. I went to Blue Mercury with a birthday gift card to buy the same diffuser and it is super pricey but also, really strong one week later. I thought I'd have to buy another one but so far, one is doing the trick and masking that smell.
I finished Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds last week. Meh. On the one hand, I loved learning all about the Dust Bowl, the horrible dust storms, drought and Depression that contributed to the situation and the treatment of migrants who came to California looking for a better life. But the book could have been a lot shorter and the characters were super wooden and the dialogue was corny and pulled from like 30s gangster movies.
Coming off White Lotus I had to watch another HBO/Molly Shannon vehicle -- The Other Two. Quick and funny enough to help decompress after a long day of work before digging into some reading.
I am really into the NYTimes' At Home and Away newsletter. This week was full of tidbits on why all the damn coffee I'm drinking is making me tired, an art installation in the desert that's “a controlled environment for the experiencing and contemplation of light” and an interview with Jenny Slate.
Finally, someone at work shared this video from Petco in our Teams chat about how our dogs are struggling with their owners heading back to the office and I so wanted to chime in that it could also be me after my youngest went to college.