Thinking in Captions

Since entering into a hellish and utterly surreal divorce almost two years ago (for starters, think accusations of adultery and public humiliation, job threats, slashed tires, rumor-mongering, a bitter and protracted custody dispute, an order for protection when things got really scary, $40,000 in legal fees on a teaching salary of $30,000, and a small, intimate fishbowl community where I teach and where my three children attend school and where I have brazenly carried on to this day in a love relationship that wasn’t adultery but wasn’t politic, either, with a teacher who used to be my son’s teacher and who also used to be married to my daughter’s teacher and who has three children of his own in this fishbowl school whose murky waters he has since left and in which I still swim) I’ve taken up the habit of thinking in captions.

My mind floats slightly above the scene in which I see myself, just the way people describe near-death experiences (or delusory mental illness, I suppose). My mind coolly surveys the situation, casting off pithy one-liners. For instance, there I lie on the couch, mail unopened, phone unanswered, mind untamed, alternately sobbing wretchedly and staring vacantly into space. Caption: “Had Good Life, Wrecked It.”

Or I watch myself jump at the sound of the front door, my face lights up as I run to greet my love, he sets down his bag and puts his arms around me for as long as I want. Caption: “I Can’t Believe I Found Him” or “Love is Worth It.” What about the kids, though? There my mind becomes relentless with its incessant captioning. Scenes: Youngest daughter sobbing and kicking when picked up by her dad, or me holding my son who is weeping because he misses the old days when his parents were married. Identical captions: “Selfish Mother Destroys Children’s Lives.”

In another scene, I’m going into stress palpitations on the night before an important observation and review at my job as a second-grade Waldorf teacher. My oldest daughter, 11, is helping me select a story to include in this important lesson plan, and she’s sitting on the couch beside me, reading something from a favorite anthology. Our bare feet are softly touching. Her hair glows around her face, backlit by the table lamp beside her. She is lovely. Caption: “Happy, Healthy Daughter With Loving Mother—Whom She Loves More Than Ever No Matter What You Think You Self-Righteous Assholes.”

Funny how the captions, emerging unbidden (and sometimes unwanted) from my subconscious are a barometer of my emotional landscape, revealing the intermittent hostility, the terror, the hysteria, and the inexplicable joy despite it all. Joy? Yes, oddly, more than you could imagine. For as much as I have suffered and wailed and stared, I have also never laughed so hard or so often as in these past twenty months. I have discovered that what James Baldwin says is true: “One discovers the light in darkness. That is what darkness is for. And what the light illuminates is danger, and what it demands is faith . . . ”
So the darkness has shown me the light, the pain makes possible the pleasure. Where once I was numb I am now skinned alive, and while raw flesh is vulnerable to excruciating pain, it is also apparently ticklish and amazingly sensitive to the slightest comforts. I am tinglingly alive and dangerously exposed. I’m naked tied to a post in a parking lot. It’s miserable when its hailing and I’ve got some frostbite scars, but there are these moments when the sun is clear and mild and the breeze is tender and carries the scent of new grass. There are these moments that I remember my humanity, and it is sublime.

Scene: Me in January, gloriously warm winter sun shining down as I walk to the corner coffee shop. It’s been a beautiful morning in the classroom among children I love, and it is a stunning afternoon outside. I walk alone down Nicollet Avenue; two young men in their sagging jeans and windbreakers pass by and whisper, “Pretty lady.” I smile at them, distracted for a moment from the paralysis of my upcoming divorce trial. A beam of light shoots down from heaven and nearly blinds me. Caption: “God Makes Winter Day Especially Bright For Young Woman as Consolation For Her Troubles” or “Later this Girl Will Drive With Windows Down and Sing Along to Love Songs.”

This terse captioning is unlike me and yet it is comforting. I have come to understand that my captions are my means of deconstructing judgment and giving up on defense. Life is much too complicated to explain anyway, so why try? I’ve come to prefer seeing each detail as a perfect reflection of the ever-emerging whole.

Take this scene: Me with my beloved getting hugged and hugged and hugged until I think I will die of happiness, and surrounding us are his three children and my three children, my little daughter adoring his middle daughter, his older daughter bringing her boyfriend over to hang out, my son looking up to his son, both embroiled in love and jealousy and the newfound thrill and agony of potential brotherhood, all of them giving something to the vision, all of them demanding, accepting, rejecting, baking creampuffs in September, sharing Christmas in December, throwing tantrums in January, chasing away shadows in February. Caption: “Maybe Selfish Tramp Mother Has Not Ruined Their Lives After All” or “Find and Circle the Two Crazy People.” Scene: Me, paying and mailing bills, holding down my jobs, meeting my deadlines, borrowing money, not from a bank, but from a couple of angels posing as human beings stepping in to help me when I desperately need it. Caption: “She is Lucky and She Knows It” or “She Brings Home the Bacon But Doesn’t Eat it Because She is a Vegetarian and That’s Why She Keeps Losing Weight.”

Or maybe it’s time to graduate from captions and simply write a pull-quote for the whole montage: “Look, She’s a Mother, a Teacher, a Writer, Making a Life, Picking Through Rubble, Finding Agates and Putting them into Her Children’s Pockets, Carrying On, Becoming Real, Dreaming Everything, Expecting Nothing, Letting Go, Being Water, Believing Love, Relinquishing Everything, Practicing Faith. The End. The Beginning.”