Dream New Dreams (23 page)

I’m sure the children do the same thing: idolize their dad. Chloe was two years old when Randy died. She doesn’t remember her father as a disciplinarian. After he passed away, when I put her in the “time-out” chair for some infraction, she would sit there and cry over and over, “I want my daddy!” She seemed to instinctively know that her daddy would protect her and rescue her from the evil woman who was holding her captive against her will. She probably also knew she was pushing my buttons, well aware that I often cried when we talked about Daddy. During those long, long 120-second time-outs, I tried very hard not to respond or react to her pleadings for Daddy to come save her. I tried not to show my hurt, and I stayed firm in making her sit there. As time has passed, the children pleaded less fervently and frequently for their father to swoop in and save them from the consequences of their actions.

There have also been times when I’ve encountered a situation that I simply didn’t know how to handle. Without my partner to turn to, I learned to talk with other people—friends or the children’s pediatrician or teachers. Turning to professionals helped me make informed decisions, and the process instilled me with confidence. At times, I still feel overwhelmed. I think that’s true for many parents—we’re frightened by the fact that our children’s lives are in our hands; it’s a weighty responsibility. Right after Randy died, just thinking about my role as the sole parent would inflame my anxiety and tighten the knot in my chest. I remember crying as I went downstairs one morning to make breakfast, thinking,
My God, I’m all alone. I’m really doing this by myself
. It wasn’t that this was an isolated incident where I was alone to start the day with the kids, but the recognition that every day from here forward would be me by myself fulfilling the children’s needs. At moments like that, I’d have to focus on getting through the next hour to prove to myself that I was going to be fine, that we were going to be fine.
See
, I’d say to myself,
I got through one hour; I can get through one day
. Each day would strengthen the base I stood on as a single parent, until finally my feet felt as though they were on solid ground.

Now that I’ve had some time to find a routine and strategies that work for us, parenting isn’t nearly as difficult. We’ve become comfortable as a family of four instead of five. As the children have grown older and their interests in life have expanded, they don’t seem to need my attention quite as much. I’m not at the point where I can read a book while they swim in the pool, but we’re getting there. As the demands of parenting have relaxed, I’ve turned my thoughts to taking care of myself a little more. By nurturing myself, I believe I’ll be a better nurturer of my children.

I
’M REALLY NERVOUS WALKING UP
to the tennis court with a racquet in hand. Not only have I never played tennis before; I haven’t played any sport since I was a kid and played ball in the backyard with my brother. Now I’m trying to figure out how to grip the racquet, swing, and connect with the ball coming at me. The tennis pro yells for me to follow through—bring the racquet up to my left ear as if I was talking on the phone. So I concentrate on talking on the phone over and over again while the summer sun beats down on me. It feels good to be in the sunshine and to be exercising. It feels good to be alive.

I got the idea to learn tennis from a magazine article I read in the oncologist’s office in the spring of 2008. Tennis is an excellent way to manage stress, the article claimed. Given all we were going through as Randy continued to battle cancer, I was in dire need of stress management! The neighborhood pool we joined when we moved down to Virginia also had a few tennis courts and offered
beginner lessons. The courts were ten minutes away and would take one hour out of my schedule. Surely I could manage one hour a week for myself.

I signed up for lessons and joined the class in May 2008. After that first lesson, I was a believer. There is indeed something therapeutic about watching for that fuzzy green ball, swinging the racquet, and feeling the connection of strings on the ball. In trying to anticipate where the ball would be and how to get my body and racquet positioned to return it, there was no room in my conscious mind for anything except the demands of the moment—no room for thoughts about Randy or cancer or, later on, my grief. No mundane tasks like making dinner or yard work could recapture my attention. For one hour, I could utterly escape the normal concerns of my life.

Playing tennis would become one of the best ways I took care of myself during the time Randy was dying and directly afterward. I didn’t realize that what I was doing at the time was escaping; I just knew I needed to get out of the pressure cooker. I had tried other activities, like going for a walk or going to the gym, but neither was mentally consuming enough to give me a break from the everyday worries. I didn’t spend those precious moments enjoying the breeze or sunshine; I couldn’t keep my worries locked away. Instead I would spend the entire walk strategizing about what I was going to do when I got back home. But tennis was new enough and difficult enough for me that my brain couldn’t focus on anything else.

Another unexpected benefit was the possibility of connecting and reconnecting with other people whom I discovered on the court. At the beginner clinic, I was surprised to run into an old high school friend. She introduced me to the wife of one of our high school friends. This was one of the great advantages of moving back
home. But it’s also the nature of tennis—it’s a social sport. People play together on the court and socialize off of it.

I immediately joined a fall tennis league, which enabled me to play once a week with a group of women. As a result, I met fifteen new people, doubling my circle of acquaintances. The friendships I’ve forged have played an important part in helping me create a new identity for myself as Jai Pausch, not Randy’s wife or Dylan’s or Logan’s or Chloe’s mom. This is something we all need: a life outside and beyond one role, whether that role is as a webmaster or a stay-at-home mom. Without tennis, I would have had limited opportunities to meet other adults and establish meaningful relationships because I don’t have a job outside the house.

In the wake of our move, there was a huge void—a major piece of my life I had to rebuild in Virginia. Tennis was a first step in that direction. Leaving Pittsburgh meant I left behind an active social life that I had built over the ten years we lived there. I had been involved at our church, where I participated in several social groups, like the parents-with-small-children group and a covenant group of four couples with children around the same age. After Dylan was born, I had joined the Pittsburgh Toy Lending Library, a nonprofit volunteer-run group that maintains a play space for children under five. Randy and I had participated in the Pittsburgh Sports League. Many of our neighbors were also of similar age and at a similar stage in child rearing; we would often have play dates and dinners together. Randy and I were blessed to count his work colleagues as friends with whom we socialized outside the workplace. There were mothers with whom I had become close through the preschool my children attended. Moreover, I had made friends through the gym, yoga, knitting, and creative writing classes I had taken. To duplicate this rich network of diverse people would take years. I had to build
a new group of friends by taking advantage of the uniqueness of our new home, instead of trying to create the same life I had in Pittsburgh.

A more practical tactic I adopted in taking care of myself was finding a way to feel safe in the house at night. It’s funny, because when Randy was alive, he was too sick to have protected us in the event of a burglary, but just his presence was enough to make me feel safe. After he passed away, though, bedtime became a time of high anxiety for me. As the quiet of the evening enveloped me after the children were asleep, the emptiness of my bed would awaken my sense of loss and aloneness. I would hear the house’s night noises, and my active imagination would conjure up robbers or trespassers in the house. On and on as the clock ticked, my mind would torture me with one horrible possibility after another until, finally exhausted, I would fall asleep, only to be awakened shortly thereafter by a child who needed comforting. I am lucky to have family living so close by, yet I was all alone in my room at night battling those anxiety-fueled demons. I had to figure out a way to comfort myself at night, and a night-light wasn’t going to do the trick.

My aunt suggested the perfect solution: a house alarm. The company installed sensors on all the doors and windows and put in a motion sensor too. When we left the house, I could set the alarm and feel secure when we returned that no one had broken in and was hiding somewhere. The house alarm helped to allay my fears when I heard a noise in the middle of the night. I knew it was nothing to worry about if the alarm hadn’t gone off, so I could go back to sleep and get some rest. A side benefit was a feature that notified me with a chiming sound whenever the front or back doors were opened, even during the day when the house alarm wasn’t set. If a child went outside when I was upstairs moving laundry around, I
would hear the chime and investigate what was going on and could more easily keep up with the children’s whereabouts. All in all, this simple decision has given me great piece of mind.

While I was rebuilding my life in Virginia and slowly creating a new life for the children, I told myself that I would do something special for myself when the children graduated from high school. This was a long-term goal—a dream I wouldn’t realize for at least sixteen years, but it gave me something to look forward to. When I had a bad day, I would think about my special plan and I would daydream about what it would be like. My dream started off simply: after the last child had graduated, I would take a trip to Paris, France, a logical choice because my undergraduate major was in French language and literature. I had traveled to that magical city three times in my life and just loved it. It was easy to reminisce about the good times I had had there and look forward to enjoying new ones after the children were grown. My dream grew in relation to the growing difficulties and challenges of each day. One week was no longer enough of a payback for sixteen years of putting off my needs to take care of others. No, it would have to be a whole year. Yes, that’s what I’d do. After I gave everything I could to raise my children to the best of my abilities, I would follow one of my dreams and spend a whole year in Paris.

For a while, this trick worked really well, but then I thought about how unfair I was being to myself to put off my dreams for sixteen years. I love to travel and have been fortunate to have visited many interesting places at home and abroad. Why should I have to give up completely my passion for travel? Couldn’t I find some way to take some limited trips new? What if I waited until the children graduated only to find out I had some health issue that prevented me from achieving my dream? How would I feel then? Bitter, no
doubt, and very angry, with no one to blame for the lost opportunities but myself.

My best friend, Tina Carr, whom I’ve known since my days as a webmaster at Carnegie Mellon, suggested we take a trip together to Italy, focusing on just Rome and Venice to make the trip manageable and not exhausting. Wow! Just the thought of seeing the ancient Roman ruins, the Vatican, and the light in Venice made me giddy with joy and anticipation. It took me about six months to plan and prepare for the trip. The most important part was to find a sitter to stay with my children for nine days, a huge job and the linchpin of our journey. If the children weren’t being well cared for and I wasn’t one-hundred-percent confident in the person watching over them, I would never enjoy the trip. Luckily, I had been using a woman who had chosen professional babysitting as a second career. She was very experienced, mature, and trustworthy. As an added bonus, she had babysat for me many times, and the children knew her very well.

When Tina and I boarded our flight to Rome, I was over the moon with excitement and anticipation. We had read through our guidebooks and planned our itineraries. I had practiced some Italian phrases, but I figured I’d rely on my ability to speak French and Spanish to get by. We managed just fine. The Italians were polite as we tried to communicate in poor Italian, mingled with French, Spanish, and English. It was a refreshing change from speaking “preschool.”

Of course I enjoyed the historical sites that Rome had to offer, but one of the things I enjoyed most of all was sitting at breakfast and enjoying a hot cup of coffee with warm, frothed milk on top. I didn’t have to jump up from the table to fetch something or clean up a spill. Instead I sat quietly, watching the Romans walk past on their way to work while I enjoyed my steaming hot coffee.

After four days in Rome, Tina and I packed up and prepared to take the train to Venice. But instead of being excited about the next leg of our journey, I felt sad. I found myself missing Randy terribly and wished we had been able to go to Venice together as we had always said we would. The grief swelled inside me until I felt I would burst. I cried standing in a beautiful Roman hotel room because I was going to the lovely city of Venice. I felt like such an idiot. But Tina was completely understanding. She just hugged me and reassured me that those feelings would pass and I would enjoy Venice even though Randy wasn’t with me.