Planting Dandelions Read Online Free Page B

End,” he saw “To Be Continued,” accepting a new gig with a band that had an aggressive practice and booking schedule, and an even more aggressive drinking schedule.
    Years later, that band came up in a conversation at a dinner party. One of the women remembered seeing Patrick perform, but her husband was drawing a blank.
    She nudged him. “It was the night we danced and danced, and then you threw up.”
    â€œThat’s the band!” Patrick and I said in unison. There was no mistaking it. Throwing up was a reliable identifier.
    Gigs were a race between the band and fans to see who could get the most drunk first. Often as not, the band won, and the music suffered. The fans were never far enough behind to care. Patrick loved being onstage in front of an appreciative audience, even if they did tend to black out. He’d gone into his first marriage and a desk job straight out of art school, and it was a chance to trip down the path not taken. Only the path wasn’t cut out for the wide load I was carrying. A year earlier, when I could drink, smoke, and party all night, I would have been fan number one. Instead, I was moody, tired, and stone-cold sober; number one shrew.
    I was only a little bit sorry about begrudging Patrick his time with the band, but I was sincerely ashamed of resenting the other chief rival for his attention: his terminally ill mother. That spring, she had been diagnosed with late-stage cancer, and the life growing in me and the life slipping from her placed us at opposite doors of a long hallway, a juxtaposition that was cruel for everyone. Patrick’s close-knit family was stricken with shock and dread, and I was deeply grieved with them, but I also felt cheated of our full measure of joy.
    My mother-in-law was a classic southern matriarch, and I was just generically bossy. We were still negotiating which one of us was in charge of her youngest son’s life when she fell ill. Cancer trumped me. I surrendered him, and hated myself for not being able to do so more graciously. He turned to the band to escape us both. I hoped she would use her leverage to make him quit, but she sighed and forgave him, which just made me feel meaner. I felt like the hysterical female in a Tennessee Williams play. I said terrible things to my husband. I wrote tear-stained apologies to the baby in my pregnancy diary for my poor choice in marriage, for the fighting and crying jags I was sure were poisoning the womb. Welcome to the warm world of the Sunshines.
    I look at those entries now, and wonder what the hell I was thinking. I wouldn’t give them to my son for a keepsake any more than I’d subject him to his birth video. That seemed like a necessary bit of documentation at the time, too, but I’ve since come to think we aren’t supposed to witness our own primordial chaos. You can know too much.
    Some of my underlying complaints about Patrick were justified, but all of it was hormonally amplified and distorted. It’s true that his attentions were divided, but he was far from uninvolved. He came dutifully to doctor and midwife appointments, willingly attended birth class, and nodded appropriately as I read aloud from my books. But I wanted more than that. I wanted him in it with me. When I reproached him with that, he had no idea what I meant. “I am in it,” he’d insist, “I couldn’t be more in it.” I’d dissolve into tears, because I didn’t know what I meant either, except I felt terribly, unbearably alone, and none of the books told me to expect it.
    Halfway through my term, I found a slim paperback tucked among the pregnancy and childbirth guides at the bookstore, called Operating Instructions . I could use a set of those, I thought, and took it home. When I came to the passage where Anne Lamott described pregnancy as a “holy darkness,” I wept with gratitude and relief. Now I knew. This was what to expect when you were