The song without the words

We fought once again last week, over something she and I have argued for years. She's held down, she says, by children and house-keeping and a husband who does not understand her. How much she'd love to let go and be like the women who work, she tells me every so often. She'd love to have a career, go out and buy her own drinks, dress up and be more than just caregiver and home-maker.

So do it, I tell her. Nothing stops you, not your two-year-old or your eight-year-old, not the house or your husband. Figure out what you want to do and make it happen. Hope and dreams are only the spirit of it all. The heft of getting what you want comes from commitment. Give it effort, set your goals firm, create the body of this life you claim you want.

We fight, and she backs into her self-righteous shell again. I don't know what it's like to be a mom, or to have an un-supportive husband. It's easier, I think, for her to believe in her helplessness than in her immense capacity to do and be everything she claims she wants. After all these years, I know better than to cry over her. Her words are as fickle as her moods, and tomorrow she'll harangue me about having kids soon, because they are so much more satisfying than anything I might do with my life.

I don't doubt her words anymore. I think, in her mind, she truly does see herself as helpless, trapped in her little house and life, unable to build anything greater than her misery.

Today, tonight, I feel her shell. I know, for perhaps the first time in my life, what it is to NOT have a way to get what I want. To be clear, I don't always achieve everything I aim for. Nine times out of ten I fall short, or it takes me three times as long as it should have, or I realize I was heading in the wrong direction and switch tracks. But in every one of those attempts, I knew what the results of my actions should be, and what I'd do if method A didn't work, or plan B fell through.

For the first time, I have no control over the outcomes of my actions. I feel completely helpless even as I work toward my goals, and know that if I fail, I must start over again at the beginning. The experience and the effort do not count, this time. There is nothing to be learnt, except perhaps how to process sorrow.

I do as I'm told, and I listen when well-meaning souls like my mother or friends tell me to take care, be strong, have faith, expect a miracle. But when there are no guarantees that hard work and following the instructions will bring me what I want, I don't know how to do this thing called hope. Without the solid presence of knowing the commitment and effort count for something, hope flops over and dies too easily. Even as I mop up the blood and check for a pulse, it is gone quicker than it flickered alive. How do you hope, when nothing you can do gives that hope a physical form?

For now, I turn to the miracles I know. The impossibility of genetics, and yet, here we are. Human flesh and form, a million species on a piece of rock hurtling around an impossible star, an improbable universe. What are the chances that life as we know it could have existed? Atoms bunched together from stardust, molecules that bumped together in a primordial ocean, clumped into a living, breathing planet. An intricate dance of chromosomes that split and recombine and keep us going. The miracle of comets, of the earth, of us. Life finds a way, as a fictitious mathematician once said. And perhaps this hope will too.