November is an empty month, hollowed out by the rain and wind, which strips away that which is no longer needed. November dismantles leaf by leaf all that once was beautiful and green and red and gold. November calls to let go and to face the dark quiet, without knowing what comes next. November calls us to let go of everything but our most essential selves and then, even then, to let go of all our ideas about what that might be, and just be..
Dismantling, breaking down, letting go, distilling. It takes a whole lot of faith to settle into the rhythm of the clearing, the making space for something still unknown. A wise woman once told me the faith of a mustard seed would do. I hope so.
There always is a moment.
For her it came on United flight 965 from Chicago’s O’Hare, as the plane broke through the rain clouds and warm sun filtered in through her closed eyes, warmed her face and hands.
It was then she realized that the only human heart who would truly be able to love her in the way she desperately wanted, no, needed to be loved, was her own big heart. Only she was capable of the love the would fill her the way she needed to be filled.
And she wondered if it was possible to love herself so deeply, after all those years of waiting for someone to show her just how lovable she was. Could she let go of her need for proof? Could she simply given in to it.
She closed her eyes and fell asleep.
When she awoke, her realization had grown from a fleeting thought to an understanding, ancient and deep. She thought of all the other women who had woken up to this fact on journeys, on buses, in taxis, in shelters and refugee camps, and suddenly she understood where thousands of generations of brave women before her found the strength to risk everything and lose over and over again only to rise like brilliant phoenixes to risk again.
No parent, no husband, no child nor friend could love her perfectly the way she needed. Knowing that it was up to her was the most liberating and welcome news of the decade.
For everything and everyone we ever love leaves, or messes up, or fades away or simply just stops. Its the nature of being human. We go.
Everyone but one human heart will one day leave us. Try as we might, we cannot escape ourselves. Whereever we go, there we are. This is the only love that won’t ever fade away, she thought. This is the only love she ever really needed.
She held this thought as a new truth as she left the plane and walked past the man in the suit saying good night to his children. She thought of all the marriages crumbling around her for want of this knowledge. How her own marriage had crumbled under the weight of hundreds or even thousands of silent, resentful and sullen accusations that his love/her love was not perfect enough to patch the hurts in their hearts. She turned it over as she glided past the airport bar where a younger Bob Dylan sang about rolling stones, and she thought of all the energy she spent trying to prove to someone else how lovable she was, only so that they could prove it right back to her.
If she could just open up to it, be brave enough to love her big hearted self the way her big hearted self loved the rest of her world, what would open up and shift? Could she finally forgive? Let go of disappointments? And accept love, messy and imperfect for the gift that it is–without measuring it up against the holes in her heart?
She carried this new realization, like a tender new born babe into the church-like silence of the empty corridor where the only sound that mattered was the sound of her boots, walking step by step home.
“Its all bullshit”, I said as I slammed the pots into the sink. Tears dripping down my nose. Nothing had happened, so the tears seemed absurd, but maybe that was the point.
Big shifts are taking place in my heart but they are so small. They are the kind of changes that can only be captured by the words…”and then she grew up”. I am finding that unlike the divorce or learning to parent, or discovering my community in this round of the adventure there is no drama. There is no crescendo or aha moments. There is no story worth telling. I keep asking her, my teacher, WHAT DO I HAVE TO DO. She smiles at me and says this time there is no doing.
This time there is just me–learning to feel unconditionally loved–learning to love myself as fiercely as I love my tribe. Learning to be my own rock without letting that rock become a wall. Learning that I can drink my fill from a bottomless well–there is no needing to ask permission or earn my way there. Its is there for me–and it is there for you too.
Learning to receive love…Its not about doing anything at all. Its simply about being.
This can be excruciatingly difficult. And I can’t explain why. Giving up all the stories about why I can’t or don’t deserve or shouldn’t try…Giving up the conditions…”I will be lovable/worthy/accepted when…”, it can set a girl in a tizzy. Its a series of explosion that is knocking down a life time of rules that somehow made it all safe–that set up the game–and gave me a plan. Its pushing my buttons. I am resisting in every way I know how.
Getting rid of the doing as a condition of being loved. It can drive a girl to exclaim that its all bullshit and slam some pots into the sink and wash them.
And then, with tears and pots both dried, there is nothing to do but admit its probably not bullshit afterall.
Sitting in meditation a lot here this week. And simply settling into a practice of doing nothing big or bold or magical but rather simply what needs to be done–Folding the laundry. Sweeping the floor. Paying the bills and shredding the papers. Shopping for groceries and putting gas in the car. Returning the library books. Going to the pool and coming back home again. Going to work. Eating. And kissing Max goodnight.
And noticing, tiny, almost imperceptible shifts that feel like earthquakes…
How do you open up to the love of the universe? How do you stop the endless tap dance that insists we need to hit the performance marks to be loved? How do you give yourself permission to settle into the lap of the world and be held? One breath at a time. Just one breath at a time.
I am a word girl. While I love visual art, can get lost in the movement of dance and revel in music, when it comes to making meaning of the world I find myself here. At a keyboard. Or with my nose buried in someone else’s poetry. My friend Jeff laughs at me. Whenever he is playing a new song he has written, I listen once or maybe twice and then demand to see his notes with the lyrics. Moved as I may be by the music, I need to take in the poetry of his words. I dive in there to open up more space so that the music can better seep in.
For the last few weeks, I have been exploring quiet places. Covering ground that seem ordinary and extraordinary all in one. It is impossible to articulate the wild ride I have been on. If they are paying attention, I think, many of my friends are confused. I am fine, life is good, and yet, I am so quick to well up, the shut down or to just grow quiet. Normally flowing over with affection, I am not so quick to rise and hug. I am ebbing a bit now. But its not a contraction. More like a centering, a stillness, a 40 day rest and coming home and being yin. I am moved, but not sad. I am grieving but am not lost. I know deep in my heart that everything is fine and have been trying to sink into the easiness of the world.
There is no way to explain what happens when you are growing while it is happening. Its a story that can only be told with a glance in the rear view mirror further up the road. Whenever I try and explain what shifts are happening in my heart right now, I find myself wordless. I stumble thinking that it seems both so big and so small all at once and that if I even tried I would sound so crazy it would defile this growth spurt. And in these moments I love that I can stop being a word girl, even if it makes me a bit wobbly.
This song is grounding me these days. While I have long loved it, I cannot tell you what the words are. Every time I hear it, I feel an expansion in my chest and feel a road roll out before me. Blue winter light filters in through snow dusted cedars and pine, the sun sinks low. I roll down my window and breathe in the crispness. The reaction is purely physical now matter how many times I hear it. Its a tingling expansion that moves from my chest out to my limbs. It is melancholy and joyful all at once. It is hopeful and content. It is not just grounding me. It raises me up above the trees, the weeds of words in my mind.
I have been in a bit of a funk lately. I have been banging around and grouchy and feeling stuck and unsure and not quite clear on what’s next. I have been feeling so powerless.
For so so long, after Juan left and I became a single parent, the goal has been simple: Survive. Just get through it.
And then, the goal was different, but simple still: Get through it with joy. And great love. And gratitude. And peace of mind.
Learning to do both of these things rearranged the furniture in my soul quite a bit. I learned a lot about relinquishing control, riding the waves of life as it came at me, going with the flow and acceptance. I learned to breathe through whatever came and to not focus too far into the future. I have learned to let go of control and to appreciate the unexpected gifts that come when it all goes wrong. These have all been good lessons. I am happier for having learned them.
But something else happened in that healing from the divorce. An unintentional consequence of my exuberance to let go. If you would have told me even 6 months ago that I would be saying this now, I would have told you you were crazy. But now in the light of day that comes when life is stable and normal and calm I can see it plain as day. I got used so used to giving in I somehow crossed a magic line. Somehow I equated acceptance with feeling powerless and I got so used to the feeling, I actually started to believe it was true.
As anyone who has been through a divorce can tell you, it is an exercise at realizing the limits of one’s power–or to be more accurate one’s power to control the outcome. Slowly but surely I woke up to the bitter truth that I was powerless to save my marriage and my vision of how it would all be. I could try and try, but no matter what I did, we had no happy ending. No matter what I did, or what I said, this horrible thing was rolling along anyway. I felt deflated by the process. Over the course of the next several years there would be financial problems I couldn’t solve, because they required my ex-husband to do something he didn’t want or couldn’t do. There were these moments when Juan promised to come spend time with Max but didn’t show and no matter how I flung my mama bear body, I couldn’t stop the waves of grief and hurt that crashed over the tiny boy’s heart. So much has come at us, Max and me, so much that we couldn’t control, I just stopped believing that I had any power to do anything other than react. We lived in the moment, breathed, did the best we could and we survived, laughed and loved.
I have spent the better part of the last 4-5 years reacting. Riding the waves and rolling with the punches. I have done it with grace if I must say so myself but I somehow lost touch with the confidence I once had–the confidence that I could actually make something I want to happen…well…happen.
The fact that I would ever allow myself to drift in this direction is shocking to me. I am honestly baffled. I am confused about how a woman such as me would arrive in this place of feeling so unable to do more than get through each day. I had no idea it was happening and yet, here I am, with eyes wide open, realizing that all this time that in an effort to save my sanity I lost my sense of power. Perhaps I even willingly let it go.
There is a fine balance, I am learning, between feeling I need to be in control and feeling powerful. There is a difference that is subtle but critical. Needing to be in control attaches to outcomes. Power however derives from the deep knowing that what you do matters, even if it doesn’t lead to the outcome you had hoped.
Power is the belief that its worth trying. Worth doing. No matter what happens.
It took having a dream, and deciding to make it true to bring it all to the surface.
And so now, there is some more rearranging of soul furniture to do. I need to touch that power again, and practice feeling powerful, even as I stay rooted in a non-attachment to outcomes. This feels like tricky spiritual gymnastics, a subtle dance I am not sure how to master. I suppose it’s an exercise of swinging between the extremes, practicing, until the balance is found.
I am not yet sure about how to reclaim my power. What do you do to claim yours?
It often doesn’t take much of any one thing. Its more like a perfect storm of a series of small moments: a dust up with a friend that leaves me feeling wounded, a summer cold or a restless night, a parenting challenge. These wee heart aches can create a sort of cocktail that can leave me feeling weary and it can kick up the deep dark loneliness of single parenting.
For the record, I want to be clear that on most days I wouldn’t trade the loneliness of single parenting for the loneliness of a stale and miserable marriage. I know too many unhappily married parents who are so much more alone than I–who cannot avoid it, who feel trapped. I know that my designation as a single mom forces me to weave connections my married to loneliness sisters may not feel permission to create.
But its on these days, the days when I am not feeling well, when I need someone to cherish me. When I feel so alone, afraid or unsure that I just wish for someone to wrap their arms around me, soothe my tired mama’s body, brainstorm what on earth to do with that amazing, beautiful, perfectly normal but challenging child. Its on these days that I don’t feel whole all by myself.
When those days hit, I can find myself, weeping like a little girl. It happens almost spontaneously. Like a child who has experienced too much birthday party, too much first day of school, too much bright lights, big city, loud noise I can find myself involuntarily withering because it feels like its just. too. much.
I have long ago found that if I let the weariness and loneliness wash over me–if I don’t try and dam it or fight it but just let it roll it will settle back again and I will feel grounded again. And if I let all that happen and I listen to my grief I might even just learn something.
So today, when I felt it well up I took its appearance as a kind of sign that maybe its time for a walk–to wander out for 40 minutes and drink some tea and sit on a park bench near my labyrinth and be.
Sitting on this bench, I wondered “What will it take until I can feel whole–when I don’t need another pair of arms to soothe me, when I can feel the ground beneath my feet and know that it is enough. What will it take to know the solidity of my own soul not on most days but even on days like this. When I can feel secure and whole even when the bottom seems to drop out and I am left as the last grown up in the room? ”
Breathing in deeply the green summer air, my face moist with humidity and silent tears it came to me.
Forty days. In the desert. Forty days. On a mountaintop. Forty days. In the sacred company of your sisters. Forty days of a rest.
It was as if the wisdom of all those ancient ancestors came whispered in one breath. Take a break and simply go to the space where you can be. Take 40 days if you need to.
A ha! Thats why the mystics of the past left to flee to the desert. Not as some sort of punishment or banishment. Not as some sort of self imposed suffering. No–it was 40 days of luxuriating in the stillness and quiet that is found in the presence of the God-spark within. They went to listen to the quiet of their own hearts. To escape the messiness of community and the hurt that we can experience as part of human day to day life.
Forty days of Lent is not some sort of punishing self ritual–but a rest in simplicity to prepare for the great transformation of springs rebirth. Its not a ritual of denial, but a ritual of return to simplicity–to the few good things which sustain us. A release of the extraneous.
In Mexico new mothers are cared for like new babes themselves for 40 days after their birth. Those forty days after the birth of a babe provide a woman a sacred space to transition into motherhood.
Those 40 day rituals…I had always thought of it as an isolation, a hiding, a contraction…
But what if it is 40 days of protection, of sheltering? What if it not a practice of cutting oneself off not from life’s richness but rather from the hurtful distracting bits of life? What if the isolation is not an exile but a retreat so that the soul work can be done, so the blossoming can begin, so the opening can happen in a space of complete safety? What if that is what Lent is really about–retreating into the simplest, quietest, most essential place to prepare to bloom in the spring time? Its not 40 days of hiding, but 40 days of practicing opening up in the safest of space.
Maybe, sometimes that is all we need to keep growing…40 days in a safe space.
Maybe that is all we need to find the earth beneath our feet.
Maybe that is all we need to find the security we crave.
Maybe it is as simple as 40 days.
Perhaps its is the wilds of a desert. Maybe it is the top of a mountain. Or maybe it is the stillness of a daily meditation practice that had long been forgotten, the luxury of healthy food prepared with love, and the careful choice of company.
I am wondering what my 40 days could be if I could carefully choose? What harmful things would I cut myself off from–not as punishment or ritualized suffering but to enable a return to myself? What habits would I abandon? What inner dialogues, worries? What people might I leave–just for a short time–because the flow of my love to them (or their love to me) has been uneven? What burdens could I let go of to give me space to bloom?
I don’t know just yet, though I am beginning to imagine. More than imagine because I am going to find out.
I am off on an adventure.
All my life, well, at least as long as I remember I have been under the impression (or should I say misconception) that if something was worth doing, it was hard. It required labor and work and a whole lot of earnestness and heavy thought.
And so it was when I talked to Kaiya about how I would heal this soul wound, the one that is keeping me from asking for what I need, the one that tells me that I should simply not want more than what I have been given, I had a plan that involved a lot of work.
I laid out my strategy for her. I involved a lot of thinking, and journaling, and making art. It would involve being still and being insightful and being open, and I was up to the task, because mind you, I am no slacker. I can roll up my sleeves with the best of them and do my work.
Sweet, Kaiya, she listens so patiently and then smiles. “What if its not so hard?” she asks me. “What if its easy?” I look at her like she has three heads.
EASY?
REALLY?
“Yes,” she said. “What if its only hard, because you are making it hard? What if part of the healing is recognizing that life CAN be easy. That joy doesn’t have to hard. That love, and abundance and wonder is all coming to you, just because. What if?”
I was silent. I kept looking at her. I heard her…but had I really heard her? What was she saying? Easy? Had I heard right?
“Yes,” she smiled “easy. What would it feel like to you if healing from this was…easy. What would that look like.”
I was stunned. I had not once considered this.
What would it be like to simply declare, “That is how I used to do things. That is how I am used to see the world. Now I am going to do it differently.” And then practice. Make lots of false starts and a couple of mistakes but playfully laugh them all off, and keep going. Easy going. Simply. Voila.
Recently while I was contemplating all this I read about how the only thing you need to do to run a marathon is start and keep going. And practice.
It has made me wonder, how many obstacles we create out of thin air, simply by declaring the path hard. Doing hard things requires energy (which we often don’t have) and pain (which we don’t want) and a certain amount of conditions that need to be pre-met. Does it mean we never start?
Or when we do start do we avoid the simple path and take a long, windy, complicated one when it isn’t necessary. How many mountains do we climb when there is a short-cut right through the pass?
I can’t tell you how many ideas I have given up on because I was exhausted and overwhelmed thinking about the process.
I am not sure what changes in life this new found wisdom will bring? Will the dreams I am dreaming unfold with grace now if I adopt this new ease. It is so tempting to fall into a trap of expectation, to swing on the pendulum so completely in the other direction but I don’t want to let myself use that as an excuse to talk myself out of faith and trust and starting.
And going.
And practicing.
Sometimes the most revolutionary thing you can do is stop trying
Stop trying so damn hard to be clever, to be loveable, to be worthy of friendship, to be cherished
Stop working to fill the potholes and empty spaces in the heart with community
Stop striving to get needs met, stop setting up the conditions for it to all come together
Sometimes the most revolutionary action is simply to sit
And trust
That we will be loved anyway
That just getting up in the morning and going about our daily business is all that is needed for kindness to flow in
That our needs will be met in the most surprising of ways and those that don’t get met will keep
That love doesn’t need to be earned and that it simply is and will be without any effort.
Sometimes that most revolutionary thought is that you don’t need to kick to be carried, to float with ease in the arms of the world.
Sometime the most revolutionary cry is
I AM ENOUGH.
Can I open my arms to embrace this revolution? Let it seep into my bones? Can you?
Today is the 1st anniversary of my divorce from Juan. Its both hard and easy to believe that a full year has passed since the courts made it official, since the judge signed the papers, since I was able to let go at another level. Of all the stories I have written about loving Juan and the process of losing him, this is my favorite. It seems appropriate to post here again. Its made it into a couple of my best hits compilations. Apologies to those who have seen it before and don’t want to read it again. New writing is coming soon. I promise.
It was an unusually warm April day. We were standing in the park. It was a Saturday but we were working–the way people in Washington, DC do. But because it was Saturday we could give ourselves a break from the relentless pace and walk around the block. We stopped in the park and stood about three inches away from each other and talked, the way we had been talking for months, about life and family and justice and my married lover and movies. Suddenly the skies opened up and it started to pour. I barely heard him over the thunder. “You know I love you, right?” he said. “Yes” I said, slipping my hand into his. The next moment before we kiss stretches infinitely out before us. Spacious. Open. At that moment everything in my life changes.
********
He slipped the key into the lock and it turned. We couldn’t believe it was ours, this house. It felt like a palace. After the studio apartment where he spent almost every night and then the one bedroom basement in Mount Pleasant that we shared, the openess seemed like a metaphor. Our whole lives lay out before us–full of possibility and hope. He rolled around the floor and I took pictures. We dragged in paint cans and ladders along with a suitcase full of dreams and made love on the drop cloths.
********
I was rolled up in a ball–scared, terrified. I was eight months pregnant and I realized that when I had this baby he might just love it more than me. I had never been loved so deeply before in my life and for the first time ever I had felt rooted and at home. I was scared, so scared that it would all start to shift away from me once there was this little person around–this child I so desperately wanted. I would become second in his eyes. I would fail as a mother and he would love me less. The tears started to drip off my chin. He wrapped his arms around me and promised me it would never come true. He would always love me. Always. And I knew he was right.
********
The day they placed Max in my arms. I knew I had it all wrong. He would never stop loving me.
********
There are endless stretches of no sleep. There are short words. There is postpartum depression. There are chores that don’t get done. There is frustration. There is unhappiness that creeps into every corner of the house. There is a child that consumes both of us and leaves so very little left. We have nothing to give each other.
But we try. We rally and laugh and delight in this child we created together. We hold hands and share our stories of him. We find our way back to each others bodies at night. We tell ourselves that love will get us through, that we are a team. We make plans and we dream. We convince ourselves it is going to be OK.
********
But work is hard. Life is hard. There is so much falling apart around us we don’t know how to start holding it all up. When we go out for dinner we are so tired we can do nothing more than stare at each other.
We love each other madly even though it is beginning to feel that love may not be enough.
********
The day he tells me he is leaving me, everything inside my body goes cold. I can’t breathe. Everything stops working and then starts working in reverse. And then stops again. The walls that just five years before had seemed so widely spaced are closing in on me. Our two year old was sound asleep in his room. How did it come to this?
We could figure this out. We always could figure it out. I beg him. Lets figure it out.
********
Nine months later, the air is so heavy in our house I cannot breathe. “I don’t know how to do this. I don’t know how to stay. I can’t do the hard work. I can’t figure it out,” he says. “I can’t believe this is us, falling apart this way.”
We are sitting three inches apart from one another. “You know I love you, right?” he says to me as he pulls his hand from mine and gets ready to walk out the door. “Yes,” I say but I am not sure he hears me. He kisses me too quickly and in an instant my life has changed again.
******
I have everything I wanted out of this divorce settlement. There was no fight. It is sketched out on a napkin at a Lebanese restaurant. We promise we would be our best for each other, for him–the only one each of us truly knew how to love at this moment. After years of disappointing each other so deeply I wonder if this was yet another empty promise. I try to so hard to forgive–to forgive him, to forgive myself, to forgive love for not being enough.
********
I need to bring my marriage certificate to court on Friday. I finally bring myself to dig it out of my files. Sometime last year I had moved it from M for marriage to D for divorce. I pull out the file. There is only one certified copy left. I need a certified copy for the court. I make a mental note to write the County and request another for my file. And then it dawns on me that this is the last time I will never need a certified copy of this document ever again. I don’t need to write the County. I put my head in my hands and the reality of the last 4 years hits me like a truck.
********
I move in and out of my day. I am so blessed. My life is a good one. I have beautiful friends, I have not been without love for one day in this whole journey–not one. I laugh every day now–genuine hearty spontaneous belly laughs. I wrap my arms around my dearest girlfriends–soul sisters who understand my heart and giggle with me until 3am. My life is messy but I am bowled over by the stark beauty of it. I am better for this journey I have taken. I am wiser and slower and kinder and gentler. I know that I would not have this–this community, this love of life, this appreciation for slowness, this knowledge of the depths of my heart had he stayed and pretended, but I can’t help but say to anyone who will listen, “I don’t recommend divorce. I say stay. Stay. Stay.”
********
I sit and play my guitar but my fingers don’t want to work on this right now. They want to twine themselves in the hands of someone I once thought I would never live without. I stop and don’t even notice that I have. ”You’ve stopped” my friend says. “Sorry” I say and I mumble something about how I was frustrated with myself. ”I want to start again”. The metaphor hits me like a ton of bricks. I want to start again. Yes–I want to go back to the moment in April when the air hung hot and the thunder clap almost drowned him out. Before I knew how it would all turn out. I want to rewind the movie and play the beginning over and over again.
Despite the thousands of ways he has found to disappoint me, I still love him.
********
I can’t live with him anymore. I don’t want to.
I remember this fact and look at my friend. I look at the guitar in my lap. I think about the richness of my life, about the gorgeous details in this tapestry that is my life. It all turned out exactly as it should have. I have everything I need.
So I pick the guitar back up. I apologize for my bad mood and rotten attitude. For the somewhat wasted lesson.
My friend launches into a spiel about how its the middle of the second period and there is another period and a half to go and you might be getting your ass kicked but you still have to put your head down and tough it out and play and hope you learn something for the next game. I want to kick him out so I can have a good cry but I know that he, with his icehockey metaphors, is right. Wait for the final buzzer I tell myself. I put my head down and I play so soft thunder would drown it out.
******
He plays Tom Waits. And then he plays another song–a song I believe I have known since before I was born. He knows I love it and he wants to cheer me up and he does– a little. I hug him–it is time for him to go. I tell him as he packs up that Friday is the day. “I know” he says. “Its hard”. There is nothing more to say than that–and I silently thank him for not trying to say more.
********
I sit in the dark and wrap my arms around myself. I breathe in and out the truth–the honest truth. I love my life, with its ups and its downs. I love the strength I have discovered in myself. I love my friends, my urban family and the rhythm of this community we have created with shared meals and Eric’s homemade key lime pie and Jackie on my cell phone and Stephen in my office making fun of me. I love Barbara with her laughter and Jen with her schemes and Jeff with his music and Cathy with her cup of coffee and the kids begging me to stay for dinner or take them to icecream. I love my housemate with her fancy salads. I love my job, even when I have to fight with my colleagues. I love raising Max more than I have loved anything else in the world. The truth is I am giving birth to a life that I love more than anything I have ever loved and I couldn’t do it without losing my marriage.
********
And I know, honestly, that I would walk this path over and over just again to sit here in this moment right now. The moon is full and I am incredibly happy even as I am sad.
********
“You know I love you, right?” I whisper to noone in particular–to the moon, to my sleeping son–to myself. I feel the words vibrate around the room before they finally settles on the couch next to me and slip between my fingers. The moment both stands still and passes quickly. And I tumble on, head over heels in love with whatever will come next.
For the last 4 years, since becoming a single parent, I have always felt as though I was within something like 20 paces of falling off the edge of the cliff, the cliff that marks my the boundaries of sanity.
At first it felt scary, to be so close to falling apart. But then I realized that 20 paces is really quite a ways a way. After awhile it felt quite comfortable. Even as I knew that it could all unravel quite quickly, I knew that it most likely wouldn’t.
There are times when I move closer, within 10 paces or even 5 of the edge. Those times initially felt scary too. The wind is stronger here and I can smell the dangersous dropoff but I have survived moving so close so many times that it feels old hat. I know 5 paces is still 5 paces and one step backwards is all that is needed to get me back to 6.
But lately, the last week or so, I have been perched with my toes curled up against the edge, gripping with every last bit of strength—channeling it all down to the tiny muscles in my pinky toes. Its not a trauma that pushed me to the edge. Instead I am just the daily business of keeping it together, through winter, through Max’s latest bouts of separation anxiety and the flu, through the battle with a house which is slowly falling apart, dissolving into a pile of broken toys and popcorn crumbs and dirty laundry and dust, Four years of trying so hard to do the work of two parents, to build a community that fills the holes in our hearts, of striving and working and being solution focused. Its got me worn out and in my exhausted stupor I stumbled like a drunk to the edge where I stand now, holding my arms out for balance and crying out “Whoa…”.
The other night as I was dropping off Max’s playdate, and running to the store to pick up the M&M’s Max needed for a graphing project, I thought if I don’t ask for help I am going to fall apart, literally, figuratively. Asking for help is hard and while I feel I have pushed past all my fears and the taboos that I carried, I still wince when I need to ask.
And truth, unlike the help I needed in the past the help I need now makes me feel so much more vulnerable. I didn’t need a babysitter. I don’t need someone to cook me a meal or give my kid a ride. What I need is a hug from someone who loves me, who sees me, who isn’t trying to change one bit of me or hope that I am someone other than I am. I need someone to appreciate me, celebrate me, tell me why they cherish me. Oh…and I need someone to sit on my couch and drink a glass of wine while I clean, cause I need to restore order to this house and I have been having a hard time settling. I need someone to help me settle.
I wonder if I can whisper wishes so precious and vulnerable out to the world? Can I ask my community to fill in this way? Even just a few people–my closest and dearest friend or two? Is it too much? I know these are needs that so many of us have unmet. If I ask, do I give permission for others to ask too…Do I open up a door where we all start unsurfacing our most vulnerable needs exposing them to the air where they can be met? Or… do I risk creating resentment and hurt during a time when everyone is so stressed, by the economy, by illness, by their own demons that feels so much bigger than my exhaustion.
Post script: I wrote this piece last week but never posted–The frantic pace of being stuck kept me from making it to my blog. And then I asked. Not wide and far but within a very tiny circle. And like a magic carpet that request swept me away to safety. I will continue to ask, because I know how easy it is to know that perch and when I am ready I will write what I learned along the way.
