I wasn’t there for the carnage. I waited a minute to gauge the nature of the wailing, whether it was a perceived affront or a bloodletting. It didn’t stop, so I trekked upstairs. Both children were intact, but the china doll gifted by their great aunt wasn’t. She lay face down on the floor in the dust and slivers of her own legs, a midden of porcelain flakes and crumbs. I apologized and declared her unfixable.
My husband waltzed in belatedly and declared that a little glue would fix her right up. The girls’ spirits lifted. But he wasn’t volunteering. As usual, I was the designated fixer. I looked again at the pieces littering the carpet. Here was an intact foot, with neat lines of severance that could probably be glued back into place, restoring the right leg. Here was the long line of a calf, an irregular polygon of knee, a block of toes. Maybe. She would never be whole, never again be a toy that could be played with, but maybe she could mostly be saved from the trash can. However, it would take time I had already budgeted for other things. My time. That mythical bank of minutes strung together to do anything other than clean up other people’s messes. I sighed and asked for a bag and kleenex to wrap the salvageable pieces. I set the amputated doll on my desk with the miscellany of her anatomy.
Weeks later, she’s still there, and I still haven’t done any serious writing at the supposedly sacred space of my desk. The calf and the knee are once again joined to the thigh. A heel is cobbled to a few toes by a network of slivers. The purportedly easily-joined foot entire is prevented from completing the right leg by a jutting wire too thick to cut, too stubborn to rearrange. I’m sanding down an edge of kneecap, which juts out a hair’s breadth, preventing its neighbor, a shard of shin, from sitting flush.
I make progress in this in bits and pieces. In lieu of my own work, I sort the puzzle, sand, and glue. My husband was right, it is possible. And I was right, it is keeping me from my own work. But this work, of piecing together, of restoring to wholeness, imperfect wholeness, a new wholeness with a slightly different shape from the old, this, too, is my job, not to give things up for lost. And this intrusion into the space I keep trying to call “mine,” is a reminder that there is no real membrane between what I keep trying to circumscribe as a literal and figurative “room of my own” and what it is to be wife and mother and human-about-the-world.
I have a door that I can close, but it rarely stays that way. And, proof positive, it gives me something to write about; it ultimately feeds my work, even if I pass through some distractions and tribulations to get there.
Life in the Multiverse 