"In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o'clock in the morning"

“In a real dark night of the soul it is always three o’clock in the morning.”

                        F. Scott Fitzgerald,  The Crack-Up

This is something I wrote in a journal I was keeping regularly for four or five years, during the time  that I was home with babies and we were doing our back-to-the-land act on an old Finnish homestead about nine miles east of Mendocino, California.

The evening that inspired these reflections was a great, boozy, and, as I look back on it, rather innocuous New Year’s Eve .  I say “innocuous” although I remember that it was the early 1980’s, a time when my husband was doing a remodel for the counterculture Zelda and F. Scott of the town and coke seemed cool.  The carpenters’ after work gatherings were often more than Miller Time.  As I look back on it, I survived the recreational drug era fairly unscathed.  I had two young children.  I have always fallen back on my own  reliables:  coffee, alcohol, anger and remorse.

This particular evening culminated in my walking home.  Not knowing where the car was; not realizing my husband had gathered the kids and gone home, assuming I would crash on the couch of our friends  in town;  somehow knowing I was too drunk to drive the seven miles of narrow paved road and two miles of dirt lane, even if I did find the car,  I decided to walk.

I arrived at our  white farmhouse in the clearing sometime after daylight, exhausted but sober.  A few months later I wrote this in my journal:

“The memory of walking home New Year’s Eve is starting to fade and it’s a shame.  It felt good to walk it off:  the cigarettes, the coke, the champagne, the last whiskey and soda or was it a half empty Heinekens I  left  on the Seagull bar; the half drunk remarks blurted at people I hardly knew; the completely drunken conversations I carried on with strangers.

I walked off all the restraints of the previous year.   All that fixing of food:  the breakfasts, the lunches, the lunches for school, the dinners for the kids, the second dinner for the tired husband.  Chewing my own way through the day, ruminating on past loves, silently chewing out my husband, nursing grudges, licking wounds, feeling the tension in my jaws.

I walked off the hectic traffic pattern that a year traces on a mother’s brain:  the trips up and down stairs, the dumping of garbage, the trips in the car to the laundromat, the health food store, the grocery store, and the kids saying at every stop, “Can I get out?  Can I get out?”

I walked through the tangle of my relationships with friends; the lifelines that started to kink, to confuse me about where the beginning was and the end, and why I  held on tightly, knowing my friends were my family.

I walked through the late afternoon dreariness that stopped my breath like a yawn and made me  hate myself for standing in the hallway talking on the phone, my two-year-old pulling at my leg while  I threaten her with a raised hand and squinty look as I tell someone, someone I don’t even like very much, how bored I am  and how mean my old man is, and then doubly hating myself for saying "my old man."

I walked long enough and late enough—no coat and high heels, five in the morning, no moon, mist heavy enough to call "rain." especially in the narrow parts where it felt more like a trail than a county road—that I walked out of the stupor and into an alertness that made me aware, not of danger, although a scream for help would have gone unheard, but of separation.  I stopped dead in my tracks and called my daughter’s name, and I was shocked to be so far from home.”