My Wife, My Life

07 Tuesday Feb 2012

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Boy @ The Window, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, Pop Culture, Work

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American University, Family, Finding Peace, Love, Marriage, My Wife, New York Giants, Perseverance, Persistence, Pittsburgh, Sleep, Super Bowl XLVI

My wife (then girlfriend) sleeping, Pittsburgh, February 8, 1996. (Donald Earl Collins).

I don’t spend a lot of time talking about my wife and son on this blog. Not because I don’t want to. It’s mostly to protect them from my thoughts, my feelings, which can change from moment to moment and from context to context. But it’s also because our marriage and our family is a work in progress. Most of what I write about here has already occurred, and I’ve emotionally already moved on from those happenings. Or my posts are about educational policy, politics, race and racism, inequality and unfairness, places where I can tap into my past and present emotions and relate to events of my past.

My wife, April 2010. (Angelia N. Levy).

Today, if only for one post, I’ll talk about my wife. Today she officially passes into that grey area of life known as middle age. She doesn’t look it at all. Heck, about seventy percent of the time, she looks a good five or ten years younger than me. God knows, though, that our life over the last sixteen years (including nearly twelve years of marriage) has been anything but an opportunity to stay young.

The last four years have been especially stressful. Between my work on Boy @ The Window and piecing together teaching and consulting gigs, with feast and famine moments throughout. Between Noah growing up and reaching the full-blown kid stage (and a year or two away from being a preteen), her two years as a masters student in interactive journalism at American University, and living in the DC area. It hasn’t been easy for either of us.

There have been moments, days, even a couple of weeks like in October, where we haven’t been in sync emotionally and psychologically. I have habits that drive my wife to drink, literally. She has an attitude about her life that sometimes makes me feel like picking up a jagged rock and pounding myself in my right temple until I hit grey matter. And, for the past year, we’ve spent as much time sleeping alone as we do collapsing together after another day of school, Noah, teaching, writing, working, consulting and cringing at our finances.

But we do have a few things that remain in our favor. We do love each other, and we do talk to each other about the things we care about the most. In the latter case, about eighty percent of the time. It would be nice if it was 100 percent. But after a decade and a half, we both need our space. We also have an eight-and-a-half year-old who is a joy to be around and nurture, even if he’s way too nosy, knowledgeable and smart-mouthed for his own good.

Today, though, while the Giants celebrate in New York City and at City Hall their fourth Super Bowl win, I

Camera-shy/mean look from Angelia at The Balcony, Pittsburgh, February 7, 1996. (Donald Earl Collins).

must celebrate the fact that I’ve been together with my wife as boyfriend and husband since she was in her late-twenties. I think back to sixteen years ago today, when I threw a surprise birthday get-together for my new girlfriend at my cramped studio in Pittsburgh’s East Liberty section. I made her a lemon cake with vanilla icing, took her to The Balcony jazz club in Shadyside for dinner, and afterwards, she came to my place and fell asleep.

She looked so peaceful after such a simple evening that I took a picture of her in my bed. Sometimes I think that this is the most peaceful I’ve ever seen her, that night, that birthday, seven weeks into a decades-long relationship.

There are so many things that I want to see happen, for me, for Noah, for my wife. But one thing near the top of the list is for her to see herself the way I see her. A person who persists, who fails and is disappointed time and time again, until they achieve and exceed their goals. A person who, somewhere in that process, is at peace with themselves. Happy Birthday, my sweet duck of a love!

My Mom, Birthday 63

27 Wednesday Oct 2010

Posted by decollins1969 in 1, Academia, Boy @ The Window, Christianity, culture, Eclectic, Marriage, New York City, Religion, Youth

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Bradley Arkansas, Death, Finding Peace, Funeral Arrangements, Happy Birthday, Mother-Son Relationship, Mount Vernon New York, New York City, Regrets

My Mother, Thanksgiving Day 2006. Donald Earl Collins

This has been a rough year for my family. But even with my financial difficulties and writing struggles, teaching, looking for additional work, my wife in grad school and Noah turning seven, nothing compares to what my mother’s gone through in the past few months. In July, my only sister Sarai passed away at twenty-seven after a lifelong struggle with sickle-cell anemia. Earlier this month, my grandmother — my mother’s mother — died after a battle with cancer and dementia at the age of eighty-three.

That’s difficult enough, to lose your only daughter and your mother three months apart. It became a hardship almost immediately. Neither my sister nor my mother made any preparations for Sarai’s death, funeral or burial. “It cost too much,” my mother said after I asked about next steps the morning Sarai passed. It took three days’ worth of work to get Sarai’s afterlife arrangements done. In the case of my mother’s-side grandmother, they were never close. My mother had been back to Bradley, Arkansas to visit her father and mother only two times since she left for the Bronx and Mount Vernon in ’66. Once in the summer of ’69, when she was pregnant with me. The other was in ’04.

Because my mother married and remarried at an early age, I’ve had a front-row seat for watching her in her twenties, thirties, forties and fifties. My mother has always avoided looking back in her life, reflecting on her mistakes or triumphs, or talking about anything that matters other than God. But one thing that was obvious to me when I went home to 616 and Mount Vernon to help with my late sister’s funeral and cremation arrangements was the sense of regret that I could feel coming out of her body. It wasn’t just grief, mourning, the rage that I’ve seen and felt when others dear to me have died. No, there was a sense of deep, repressed regret, about all the things that could’ve and should’ve happened, but never did.

I heard that same sense of missed opportunity in my mother’s voice a few weeks ago, after my mother called to let me know that my grandmother had passed. I’d only met my grandmother once, when I made arrangements during what I called “my Southern poverty tour” as part of my social justice fellowship job to visit Shreveport, Louisiana and Bradley, Arkansas. So while I didn’t feel much for the woman, I did feel for my mother.

I felt for her because unlike my mother, I’ve said everything that I could’ve left unsaid to her years ago. The family intervention (see “The Intervention,” January 21, 2008) I orchestrated nearly nine years ago. All of the arguments we had when I was growing up. My PhD graduation ceremony at Carnegie Mellon in ’97. My I love you’s to her now.

I may regret that our relationship isn’t closer, but at least I know why. I certainly regret how I’ve said some of the things I’ve said to my mother over the years, but not the meaning of my words. The only serious regret I have now is not being in a financial position to do more for my mother than I have over the past quarter-century, to make some aspects of her life easier. Still, all I can wish for her is a Happy Birthday, or at least, a day in which she can find peace. Hopefully, one birthday, she’ll have both.