Dead Hydrangeas

The girls take piano lessons across the street from a house Jesse and I considered putting a bid on. We called it, “the beach house,” because it reminded us of the type of houses we’ve seen in OBX. We liked the house a lot, and if we hadn’t seen the home we are living in now, we probably would’ve put a bid on it. The house we live in now was my first choice. I knew from the moment I saw it on the internet that this was the home for me. There’s a big tree in the front that I’ve learned turns yellow in the fall. I get to stand at the kitchen sink and look out of a picture window at our yard. We have this little room off the kitchen with a brick fireplace, and I’ve turned one of our bedrooms into a cozy writing nook. Plus, our home is not far from campus, and every day I get to live out my fantasy of becoming Annie McGeary.

Jesse and I want to do a lot to our home. The basement is a hot mess right now, and we need a new roof over our garage. But it’s a good house, and I believe we can take what’s here and make something beautiful out of it.

Still, every week when I take the girls to their piano lessons, I take a look at that sea foam front door across the street, and I wonder what might’ve been.

Hadley and Harper’s piano teacher is amazing. She’s the most creative piano teacher I’ve ever been in contact with. She has cute little worksheets on clipboards with sharpened pencils waiting for them when they arrive. She uses an exercise ball to show the girls how to understand a beat. They sit on it and bounce, or they play catch with her while they sing. She’s taught them a dance routine to “Ghostbusters,” to show them the difference in notes. My favorite thing she does though, is sit down next to my girls and play along while they play the song they are to have practiced that week. It could be “Old MacDonald,” or, “Mary Had A Little Lamb.” No matter how simple the melody, this woman plays alongside and turns the song into something jazzy, something classical, something so beautiful I find myself tearing up to, “here a quack, there a quack, everywhere a quack, quack.”

“That’s the sort of thing you can do once you know the notes,” she tells Hadley and Harper, and I swear we are sitting in the house of Maria von Trapp.

I can see the house across the street from where I sit during the lessons, and once, while I was staring at it, leaning towards the window to see if I could see inside, and wondering what life would’ve been like had we lived across the street, the piano teacher’s oven beeped and she said, “Excuse me one moment girls, I’d like to put something in the oven for dinner.” The girls continued to practice while she walked to the kitchen. I heard the oven open and glass being placed on metal. She closed the oven door, and walked back into the lesson. I looked down at the stack of papers I was supposed to be grading.

This woman’s house is spotless and cozy, she’s doing a job she loves, and soon her home is going to be filled with some kind of midwest deliciousness. Her husband will come home, they will open a bottle of wine, and talk about their day. Will she read a book tonight? Will she watch a favorite show? Maybe go for a walk alongside the cornfield and into that park with the big pond down the road?

What do I need to inhabit to get to do all these things? Stop talking to me about perfectionism. I haven’t emptied my dishwasher once since we moved, let alone cooked a meal. I’ve thrown away so many assignments because I’m too tired to grade them, and I barely know the lessons I’m supposed to be teaching. I miss writing. I miss the slow, deep work of putting down sentences and creating lesson plans. I miss running. I miss my kids. I haven’t seen Jesse in the daylight since September.

This job I am doing is so hard, and something inside of me is dying. I tell Jesse in my darker moments that this job is killing me. I don’t think I’m actually going to die, but something is lost and I don’t know what to do about it.

I read an interview with Dolly Parton and Reese Witherspoon in InStyle. They discuss woman and work and family, and I read it closely trying to see how they do it. They lead great big creative lives and it seems that if I want to do that: teach and write and mother and make casseroles that I won’t eat, then I have to learn some of their secrets.

“I have dreamed myself into a corner,” Dolly Parton said. “And now I have to be responsible for it.”

That sentence made me so sad. I have dreamed this life up for myself. Everything I’ve ever wanted, I have: a book deal, a house, kids, a husband, teaching. I am responsible for it. I cannot quit.

We have this gigantic hydrangea bush in front of our house. When we moved in, the flowers were light green and I snipped some and put them in a vase to bring inside. They are beautiful. Today though, they are a crispy brown and their stalks look like I could snap them in two if I sneezed. Jesse’s not sure what to do about them though, because he thinks he read somewhere that there is a certain kind of hydrangea that isn’t supposed to be tended to even if it it’s dying. Even if it it’s an embarrassment to the Curb Appeal HOA committee, you are supposed to leave this plant alone while it dies because there’s something in the death it needs in order to grow again.

I really hope we have that kind of hydrangea in our front yard. I hope we leave it alone and give it some space so it can use whatever it needs in that death to figure out how to grow again. It’s really a beautiful plant. I don’t want to give up on it yet.