Last week I broke a bowl. It was an oversized green cereal bowl that I didn’t care that much about. Until, of course, I broke it, at which point it transcended its bowl-ness and became the story of my life. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
About a week before I broke the bowl, I was spring cleaning. I went through my closet, bravely tossing adored but tattered sweaters, misshapen boots and jeans so snug I never should have bought them in the first place.
In my kitchen I weeded out Tupperwares that would always smell like tomato sauce, disappointing gadgets (like the Cuisinart that promised, but never delivered, cuisine that was the least bit artistic) and tired dishware. As I held the green bowl over the give-away bag, its life flashed before my eyes.
My husband and I bought the green bowl at Pottery Barn eight years ago, a few weeks before our wedding. We showed it to his mother, thinking we wanted place settings for 10 just like it, but after living with it for a few days, changed our minds and opted for handmade pottery. The green bowl became my husband’s everyday cereal bowl. Eight years later, I was ready to move it on. It wasn’t our wedding china, after all. Rather than evoking romantic or even sentimental memories, all it evoked was the realization that my husband ate a gargantuan amount of cereal every morning. I lowered the bowl into the give-away bag. Immediately I was visited by overwhelming sadness and self-loathing, the same feeling I had when I realized, at age 12, that I would always be taller and weigh more than Davey Jones. I pulled the bowl out of the bag and put it back in the cabinet.
A week later I was washing dishes when the dogs got into a squabble. I turned to see what was the matter, and the green bowl flew from my hands and shattered in the floor. I looked worriedly at my husband.
“Oh well,” he said, then got a broom.
Which was when it hit me: the green bowl was dead to us. Not only that, it was possible that it had been dead to us for years, but we simply couldn’t let go. Now that it was broken, we had no choice.
It started me thinking. Once, I left a boyfriend not by leaving, but by finding a different one. Once, I left a job by getting fired, and once, I left another job by initiating a long, painful, self-destructive round of panic attacks. Once, I embraced my independence by becoming hideously dependent on someone, which ensured that he would leave me, thereby forcing me to be independent. Once, my mother gave me a gold ring with my initials on it, which I promptly threw on the ground and ran over with my bike.
“Didn’t you like it?” she asked when I handed the badly distorted ring back to her.
“I love it,” I lied, “but unfortunately it’s broken now, so I can’t wear it.”
And recently, my husband had a conversation with a friend in which the friend declared he was through with one artistic aspect of his life and moving on to another.
“Just like that?” I was incredulous. “Doesn’t he have to burn an important bridge, traverse the waters of burn-out, over-think his decision to the point where he’s no longer clear about his own desires, fail miserably at what he’s currently doing so as to have an excuse to leave, or become depressed and immobilized for years first?”
“Apparently, some people just listen to their heart,” my husband said.
What an idea.
E-mail Dana Shavin at danalise@juno.com.