You Are Not Needed Now

I have been singing the old Townes Van Zandt song, You Are Not Needed Now to myself. I find it creeping into my daily life, into my sleeping mind, into my times of rest and the fragile moments of work when I fight through the pain to make my fingers dance across the keyboard like they always used to, but now have to be coaxed into doing. I am turning into a statue, a relic of the past, not (h)armless, but at the very least handless and with touch feeling like pain instead of sensation. Townes Van Zandt singing his sweet tune to the dead Janis Joplin, now sounds like an existential threat to my very existence.

Townes was singing to the dead Janis Joplin. I am no Janis. I am not nearly that special. Still, every soul needs to be told it can rest and doesn’t need to fight, and as Townes sang Joplin’s soul to rest, it feels as if mine gets calmer. Not being needed is not necessarily a bad thing, however sad it may be. It is just the way things go in the end. There is something that I know, something that Townes knows, that the soul that fights can never rest. I need permission to stop fighting, to rest, before I drive the world crazy with my refusal to simply give up, to relent, to surrender to the inevitable. That bus is hurtling downhill towards the light, and I might not like it, but I have a seat reserved on the next one. Perhaps heaven might be some 1950s beat road trip to visit old Bull Lee. Perhaps that is what heaven is to me. I don’t even know where to go, or what to do, or who I am any more. I am not needed now.

It feels as if Townes is calling out to me to give the world a break, give those I love with my damaging, devoted, all-sacrificing love, a break from my quest for their safety and happiness. “Give it a rest, Detroit! Let the dice tumble as they may. You can rest now!” Fat chance. I have been fighting chance, governments, desperate men and the seductive wiles of the poppy and the fermented grape for as long as I can remember. I do not know who I am without the fight. I don’t know who I am outside of my identity as a mother and for that I feel cheated and angry and lost, like life took everything it wanted out of me, and once it had done with me, once I was not needed to protect and love I was simply on the scrapheap, with not a single person caring about me as me. I was told to live for my children by every fiber of my being, by every person who voiced an opinion. Now I am more or less alone, now the Boy is growing up and moving towards independence I am simply surplus to requirements. I am not needed now.

Being a mother saved me. That is a fact. I existed entirely for other people, for the children when no one cared if I lived and I was living under constant torment and danger. I fought for them. I put my own body and mind and youth on the line and sacrificed it all. I breathed for them. I survived for them. I pulled them through under my protective grasp, into a better future. Or so I thought. I at least damn well tried with everything I had, and everything I did not have.

Mother is a somewhat temporary, albeit all-consuming position. Those glory days when I was the moon my children revolved around, when I could make everything alright, everything happy, everything safe, those days have long gone. Now here I am with one child, and he is not a child any longer. Not by my reckoning . . . nor his. Off he goes into the future, the future which is his, provided by me, and secured by nothing more than my stubbornness and the goodwill of others who sought to even the odds a little, and the magnanimity of California which provided us sanctuary. I have almost succeeded in putting out a decent, kind, utterly lovely young man out into the world who is now volunteering with charitable organizations in his spare time. He is not just ready to launch into the world, by the time college rolls round he will be off making his own life, his own choices, his own happiness. That was the goal all along. But that leaves me utterly alone.

Don’t get me wrong – I am happy. This is the end goal which I never really thought about. I just thought about survival, about keeping us together. It never occurred to me that in the end, ‘together’ was not going to be what happened. Now I have to face it. I wish I had had more children. I wish I had some pre-teens running around the house to take away the sting, but I don’t and now here I am, a menopausal old woman, in terrible health with absolutely nothing to look forward to. I have no desire for relationships. I am busy filing the past away, my motherhood away, in memory banks, seeing if I can make small withdrawals on happy times, and sad times, but at least together times when my life’s purpose was not pulled out from under me. In my head I am the same person.

I stop and breathe in the memory of a trip of Tokyo Disneyland, seeing their happy little faces break into rare smiles as they ran on head towards some Tom Sawyer Island joy. I remember sitting with them in donut shops and Starbucks cafes talking about movies and the latest gossip from the Good Old Land of Yore, their childhood make-believe play place, where ‘homemade games’ made up for the fact I had no money for toys or computer games. I remember a hot summer’s day in Tokyo, buying firecrackers and decorations and gulping down icy drinks from vending machines and hiding from the oppressive September sun. I remember hands in mine. I remember promises and I remember having a family. Now I am lost. I am not needed now.

I did my job well: I am not needed now. Still I am reeling from the consequences of being their mother. I still have the Hague on my back, I still have the stress of being forced by the Hague to stay in an abusive marriage and return to it in order to stay with my children. I bare the scars of it all, both physical and emotional. The scars of motherhood are ground deep into my bones and my soul, and I am glad for them. Being a mother has been my life’s work, and my deepest joy, as well as my greatest sacrifice and pain. Now I am comparing schedules and working out when my son will be around over the summer, and it both leaves me utterly alone and sad and without family, and also deeply proud. I did it. I have raised a successful human being, who is profoundly moral, and kind and has the pep and vigor and bounce in his step of a fit young man who respects himself and others around him.

Thanks to quirks of fate, I also have precisely no family other than him at all. None. I would be angry, but that would not be fitting. I light candles and I do good things, small mitzvah where I can, and dedicate them to the souls of those who are dead and that I loved and that I never knew, but am tied to. Somehow it makes me feel grounded and connected. I say their names and cover my eyes and sometimes I think perhaps one day they might see me too, we might be reunited and I might get to hear them say ‘well done, darling. That was so hard on you. You did so well.” I long to hear my grandmother’s voice, her thick accent laying like a blanket over my soul, and hold onto her curly hair like I did when I was small. I long to be lifted up to knock on the lion’s head doorknocker by my big strong grandfather with his Polish vodka and his survivor’s work ethic. I long to be the child, not the mother.

I am not needed now, and yet I need to be loved. To be needed is to be adored, and I love other people deeply and dearly and my love has no outlet, my devotion and strength has no relief. I have no where to point my efforts. Sometimes I wonder if that alone will kill me, if my body will say ‘Ah…ok Detroit, you are not needed now, time to go home!’ That both scares and relieves me. Maybe I can do more on a spiritual plane than I can here with my feet on this imperfect earth. Perhaps I will have more people on the other side than I ever will here. I have no desire for relationships, I don’t like other people much, at least in general. I can’t think of anything I want to do, or want to be, or want to see or need to accomplish. My writing is what it is. I am out of time. I don’t belong here. I can’t get up the enthusiasm or the energy to take on a project. I am cut adrift. I don’t want to party. I don’t want to dance. I have no desire to drink or get high. I don’t want to play music. I am too old for all that, and too sick and to be frank, too much of a good girl in my old age. I don’t want any of it. I don’t feel I need to pray more than I do. I will never be a popular author or make money from this in any amount. I don’t need to learn or know more than I know, there is no use in that. I don’t want to go back to college or out on the road. I want to drink tea, and watch movies and read books and watch others as they live their lives, as they go out there into the world and start their own tales. I want to retreat into my own story, and settle down into its bones. I don’t want to do chemo. I don’t want the steroids. I don’t want to feel worse in order to live longer.

What I want is to live out what I have in peace. Perhaps enjoy the sun rising and the dusk settling. I want to see a coyote walk across my path as I take my morning walk. I want to not feel pain every moment of the day. I want my son, one day, to tell his children, his many lovely children who are yet to be thought of or born, that he loved his mother and that she loves them. I want his respect and admiration and love. I want someone to read my words one day and say ‘man, that girl could write!’ I want to walk, as a ghost, down streets in cities that thought they got rid of me, and say “I am not needed now!” I want to walk and I want to watch and I want to dance on the sadness of evil things. I want to be that small blue thing, that little sphere of light that sits on the shoulders of the sad and lost and whispers stories of strength. I want there to be magic amid the loss. I want there to be wonder amid the banality. I want there to be possibility and hope alive within the mundane and hopeless day to day reality. I want to see the beginning and the end, and all the bits in between and wonder at it all. But not today. Today I want to sit and read and perhaps write. I want to listen to Townes and I want to listen to Uncle Lou. I want to wrap myself up in Rimbaud and roll in the mud and blood and fury of Sylvia Plath, and I think I will do that. I am free to, now that I am not needed now.