Six AM is my sacred hour these days. Even when I haven’t gotten a full night’s sleep, I get up and I do my thing and the day begins from a place of calm, which helps me maintain diplomacy around corporate tightwads (pot meet kettle, etc.).
I’ve learned little tricks that stretch the morning into something slower and sweeter. For example, I used to hop out of bed and immediately brush my teeth and put contacts in. Now I know to fire up the coffee maker first. By the time I’m done in the bathroom, it’s brewed and ready to go. Those extra five minutes are molasses.
Like most people (whether they realize it or not), my senses inform my sanity. Overhead lighting is banned from early mornings. I make coffee in the dark.
The other morning, as I filled the water and scooped the grounds, I kept thinking I saw something move. I wrote it off as any half-asleep person making coffee in the dark would. Not to mention, because I have a lot of angels in my life, I see things out of the corner of my eye all the time. Figured maybe it was my dead sister whispering go back to bed and hug your man, for one day this will all end or whatever. But then, in a moment of terrifying stillness, frozen between the butter dish and the Moccamaster, there it was: first roach of the year.
“Ohhhhhh my god oh my god oh my GOD,” I said in what I’d describe as a contained yell, just loud enough to wake Andrew while intimating that I was “trying” “to” “keep” “it” “down.” I have a crippling fear of bugs and I needed to be saved! My white knight puttered out in his underwear with the handheld vacuum and zero urgency.
“It’s a really big one.”
“They’re all the same fuckin size.”
“No, this one is huge.”
*holds index finger and thumb a good three inches apart to dramatize enormity*
Andrew prodded at the counter with the vacuum, mumbling drowsily, thoughtlessly, “He’s just a lost little guy, you know? He probably came up through the sink. He’s not going to hurt you. He’s just lost.”
I love the human brain before dawn—particularly the male brain—for the layer of fog that shrouds the bad parts. Love is its only available resource.
Maybe the roach had escaped before Andrew got there, or maybe it was never really there in the first place. All that mattered was that I became sympathetic to its existence. I saw my own lostness and ugliness and rejection in the roach and I came to love it and I came to love myself and all the lost, ugly, rejected souls who go around making each other feel unlovable.
Now, I won’t bore you with tales of roaches. People who’ve invaded my space and aroused the kind of tension that shrivels and compresses the body—those whom I wish to suck up with the vacuum. But I cannot overstate the gravity of finding someone who teaches you to love them. Someone who reminds you that, though now you’re making coffee, though now you have a morning routine with a roomy five extra minutes, you, too, have crawled out of the drain, alien and exposed. That you, too, have been caught in the shadows by someone who doesn’t understand you—or worse, fears you. That roaches have been around for 300 million years and don’t you love old things? Don’t you run your hands along the lace of a vintage dress, feeling for cigarette burns and other such stories?
This is how to be a partner.
This is how to be a partner.
This is how to be a partner.
People who meet all crawling creatures with love and compassion…they are the best of us 🤍
I saw the title in my email and really prayed you did not have a picture of one in here. Deathly afraid of them - even the emoji makes my skin crawl. Desperately hoping my son is as fearless and loving as Andrew.
This is parenting.
This is parenting.
This is parenting.