Pattern making

People search for patterns in the chaos of this random universe. Clouds make pictures. Inkblots too. We see patterns in the squares of pavement, in the throwing of dice. Chaos is untenable. Randomness, unthinkable. How can we go forward trying to make sense of what is wholly without sense or order?

Yet chaos has order, is beautiful. There are patterns so perhaps we do not so much impose patterns on chaos as subtly discern, subconsciously or not, the existing pattern, latch onto it limpet-like. Perhaps there is order to be found and all we do is find it.

Not that I think that’s what I’m doing now, exactly, but it makes it sound better than simple grasping at proverbial straws. Watch this:

Instead of returning to England (or staying in Philadelphia) when Ed finished his PhD, we moved to (south) central PA, a place neither of us had ever intended to go, and which I actively resisted going to. We traded in a smallish, but much-loved Philadelphia house for larger house in a small town, farther from my parents but only by an hour.

A week after we move, my mother is diagnosed with Alzheimers (at long last). She has clearly gone downhill quickly in the last few weeks and suddenly what was a niggling worry is now a family crisis.

If I had just moved to England, I would have been distraught past all imagining. How would I have managed to be present, to help, to support, to just deal. Clearly, staying in the United States for the time being was a good idea, even meant to be.

AND (I only just managed to reframe this one) we have not seen my mother very much these last few months because visiting her in NY had become stressful and unpleasant. Without understanding why, I knew it was too much for my parents to have the children visiting. So I asked my father at the end of last week what we should be doing. Should we, I asked, come and visit more regularly?

No, he said. We need to come see you. It’s better for your mother.

And now I live in a place that they can have their own room. Where I can put cable television into their room for my dad. In a house that can absorb two more people without cracking. In a place that has a slower pace, where my mother and dad can walk to the grocery store and to get a coffee and come back to sit in the garden. And I only live in a such a place, we could only have afforded such a place, because we moved to a small town. In Philadelphia, there was no spare room and the house felt crowded as soon as they arrived. And it was down the Jersey Turnpike, which my dad hated driving on.

So maybe that’s why I’m where I am right now. Or at least, it makes where I am make more sense to me in the wider context of my (rather than just Ed’s or the children’s) life.

Order from the chaos. A reason for what seemed not right. It makes it a little easier to be where I am. It makes what’s happening to my mother (which is its own brand of unsensical and chaotic and unreasonable) a tiny bit easier to bear. That I live in a house they will be happy to come to. That I am a drive, not a plane ride away. Maybe right now I am where I need to be.

(Except that it’s even easier to write that last sentence because I’m in England on holiday right now and as happy as a pig in mud, I tell you. I did mention we were going, didn’t I? Oh. Oops. Well, we’re in England for the first time in years and it is insanely good to be here. But it will be okay to be home again too.)

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