Sundays are family dinner nights.
Nights when we gather with our community around a shared dinner table, laden with food. Nights when the house vibrates with the joyful noise of children tumbling over one another. Nights when I stop and say a silent thank you for the life that has unfolded, a life rich with people who I love.
This past Sunday was Yom Kippur. We planned dinner early so that Jackie and Eric could join us before the fast began at sundown. We put out the best china and paper napkins and Odette and I cooked Rwandan food, and salad and apple crisp and then we light candles and fill the house with music and golden light.
As the sun goes down, we sit together on the floor of the living room, stuffed from too much food, children climbing over each other like puppies. And then as the neighborhood grew dark, we grab the left over bread, light tapers and walk down the street, out to the park, across the field to the bridge. The wooden bridge over the creek.
In daylight, this creek is full of preschoolers throwing rocks. When Max was small we would come here and I would sit on the big boulders on the side and watch him wade into the water–looking for pebbles. He learned to skip rocks here. My impatient sigh lost in the bubble of the water, in the murmur of the play. When the tension in the house was too much, when I had no idea how to breathe, we came to the creek. And I always, somehow found the inhale by its banks. This creek taught me how to breathe.
But now, the creek is silent, black. We cannot even see it but we all know it is there. We know, that if we dropped a rock off this bridge now, we would hear a loud plop. Faith, I suppose. Or deep intimate familiarity. Maybe a bit of both.
Jackie reads the Tashlich service. And one by one, we each think of the things we would rather leave behind, the things we want to fall away, the things we want to give to the dark, to the river. Resentment, envy, unkind words. The illusion of being stuck. Lack of faith. Impatience. Ugliness. Sorrow. We threw our breadcrumbs into the river and with each crumb we let go, if only a tiny bit, of that which was weighing us down. It falls into the blackness, into the creek. It is carried away, to be food for fish or maybe migrating ducks, to return to a useful purpose.
Hand in hand, arm in arm, we wander back up the street, lighter. It is time for homework, for bed, for getting ready for the week. It is time to move on. And joyfully we did. We do. We will.
the leaves believe
such letting go is love
such love is faith
such faith is grace
such grace is god
i agree with the leaves
-Lucille Clifton
Dear Max-
It is hard for me to believe that it was eight years ago this morning that I first held you and called you by your name. Now you have to contort and fold yourself up to try and fit into my lap. Like a Chinese acrobat you always manage to do it. We have both grown so much since that day eight years ago.
I have said this before but being your mama has been the greatest adventure of my life. And you dear boy have lived every minute of your last year as though its been a great adventure. I have learned so much from you about jumping into life with both feet and getting my heart, soul and whole body soaked.
I am so impressed the way that you embrace things that are hard and scary and push through. Like on your first day of hockey, you came off the ice at a break close to tears because it was so hard. You hadn’t realized how tough it would be. A lot of boys quit that day but you got back out there and you were the first kid on the ice each Saturday morning.
This is the year you fell in love with Harry Potter. Now every pencil, every Tinker Toy, every piece of bamboo that we find is a wand and you are making the whole world sparkle with magic. This is the year you decided to grow your gorgeous hair long and have become the envy of most of the women in our town. This is the year that you woke up early every morning during hockey season to check the NHL stats–see what happened the night before. This is the year that you were the Addition Champion of the World (or at least of first grade) four times in a row.
Last night we put on Jack Johnson and danced in loops around the living room. You walked on your hands to “Upside Down”. You are always reminding me to shift my perspective.
I am such a girly-girl with my knitting and my soul sisters and all that. You have woken up a whole new piece of myself, a piece that I thought went by the way when I grew up–the part that loves hockey, the part that enjoys wrestling, the part that enjoys tromping through the mud and rolling on the ground and searching for frogs and toads. You have come to me and I know that as a result of this short time I get to be your mama, I am becoming more myself.
Eight years ago I started to really understand about love. Every day I learn more thanks to you.
You are my heart’s delight. Happy birthday dear boy.
Love,
Your mama
-
“Everything cuts against the tide, when you’re by my side” -Jeff Tweedy
Tonight, after dinner, I bundled up Max and his best buddy Jake and we headed to the ice rink. It was the last game of the summer season of the Mullet League, one of the many “old guy” hockey leagues that play late in the evenings. We were there to see a couple of friends, guys who love the game so much so that they ignore the aches and pains of middle age and keep playing.
We were the only three people in the stands. Max and Jake waved their handmade signs and cheered whenever Dan or Pierre came on the ice. Max ran the length of the rink with his sign over his head whenever Dan touched the puck and carried it toward the goal. And when Pierre scored a goal, we looked at each other with glee and said, “Did you see that? I saw that! We were here to see him score!”
One of my greatest joys is being a witness.
Being the one who goes, to who stands beside, who watches with wonder and cries because it is so beautiful. Who cheers or bows her head or simply looks on and says, “yes… I see you are strong, gorgeous, smart, amazing, daring, brave”. I am at my happiest when I am standing beside someone I care about and simply being there while they do something brilliant, terrifying or heartbreakingly difficult. And I can wave and say I am here. I saw you do it. It is true and real.
I am teaching Max that 90% of being a part of a community is simply that, bearing witness to each other’s lives. Listening to each others stories with wonder and awe and compassion. Being there for each other as we bloom and wilt and breakdown only to breakthrough over and over again. Its not about doing the right thing, or saying the right thing but simply about being there–steadfast.
Being there seems to be my skill. In fact, I am beginning to believe its my purpose. To hold space, to witness. To see people, as they are–amazingly strong, utterly resilient, brave and bold and sometimes broken but unbelievably gorgeous in their being. To stand there and say, “I see you. I see your dreams, your fears. I see you, not the pretend plastic coating that you put on but you, with your messiness and your struggles and I love you. Its all going to be ok.”
Isn’t that why we all come here, this community of writers who come to bear witness to each other’s writing, lives, stories poured out on the page? We come to hold the space so something beautiful and healing and new and centering can be born. We take leaps, we soar, we sometimes fail, but above all we bear witness.
For you, who come here, or sit in my living room. For those of you who have commented, or who have held me while I cried, who played me music so I could dance or simple said, “I am here”. You are my witness to this messy and full life, spilling over with happiness and grief and fear. This is for 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.
Its the longest night of the year. It is cold and rainy. And yet, I know, deep in my heart that the world is turning, that the sun is on the rise, that goodness and possibility and joy are just around the corner, for me and for you too. And all we need to do to get there, to the warmth, to the sun, to the bright days ahead is stay here, exactly where we are, with one another.
When the night has come, and the land is dark
And the moon is the only light we see
No I won’t be afraid…no I won’t be afraid
Just as long as you stand, stand by me.
My sweet Jackie and her precious daughter, the one who sat in that magic purple stroller.
It was only four words. Four words that I spoke out loud only by accident. I was newly pregnant. Juan and I were walking in the park. “That’s a nice stroller” I said tangentially to Juan, nodding toward a woman walking just a few feet away pushing a baby in a purple jogging stroller.
“Are you pregnant?” she said.
“Ummm…yeah…”I replied, nervous about putting the words out there publicly. “Just about 11 weeks”.
“Me too” she said “Eight weeks.” She nodded to the little one in the stroller. “They will be just 18 months apart.”
We walked together for a long stretch, down a pathway, around the corner, through the woods, across a street, talking about midwives, and children, a families before we finally said goodbye.
After that day, we waved and said hello when we would bump into each other. Later at the park, our babies, both boys, would sit together in the sandbox while we chatted about being working moms. We would push our kids in the swings and talk.
It was she who told me about the pre-school where I would eventually send Max, and the one who insisted that I sign up on the waiting list even though they were full. When Max got into her son’s class it was she who called to welcome me, sign me up for classroom duties and made me feel welcome. It was at that place where I met Jen and eventually where Jen (and I) found Odette.
And it was she who would eventually become my soul-sister, the mother of my son’s dear friend, the anchor of our neighborhood community. It was she who eventually introduced Max and I to a myriad of people who make our world sparkly and what it is today.
I often wonder what would have happened had I kept my thoughts to myself that day. What would have happened had I not nodded in the direction of the woman with the purple stroller. I’d like to think that I would have found Jackie anyway. That we would have landed around the same campfires gazing up at stars, that we would have still made communal meals, that we would spend hours watching addictive TV or picking lice out of our children’s hair or roaming through Miami Beach through some other path. I like to think that our hearts would have found each other some other way, some other place…but its hard to know for sure.
This weekend I sat on a rock pile with Jackie and Dolores, one of the dear people who Jackie brought into my life. I wrapped my arms around Jackie and held her close, so grateful I was for her simple presence here in my life. We were laughing about life and how it turns out, about Girl Scout troops, about the unexpected.
As I look forward this week to Thanksgiving I am reflecting on all that make me grateful. Not just for the big amazing things, like community and love and friendship and soul sisterhood. But for the small things, the tiny imperceptible decisions that lead to developing these things in our lives. For the coincidences and the tiny moments when the world unknowingly shifts and changes and spins in a new direction. For the words I uttered about a purple jogging stroller that would, unknowingly, begin to weave a strong support net, one that would catch me when I fell out of my marriage and into a new way of being. And for the love I might never known had I not uttered them.
Who would have thought, “That’s a nice stroller” would have been a magic spell, but those four words drew open a door through which love has paraded on through.
Tell me about what tiny little things you are grateful for this week….Tell me a story of something small that opened the door to something big and wonderous. Leave a comment here on the blog or leave us a link to your post on the matter. On Thanksgiving night I will randomly pick one of you to receive a piece of Jackie’s amazing pottery.
For Jackie, who I love greatly.
This past week I have been walking dogs. In the face of illness and tragedy, it seems like the only thing I could possibly do was show up, and walk the dog. When the humans were grieving, vomiting, sleeping, pacing, someone needed to walk the pooch. This week that human was often me.
Walking the dog is just something that needs to be done, like laundry or taking out the trash. No matter how worlds spin out of control, a dog needs to be walked. For me, walking the dog has become a metaphor for picking up and getting on with it. For continuing acknowledging pain and then just doing what needs to be done, without fanfare or drama. Quite literally it is about cleaning up the poop, stretching ones legs, breathing in the air and going around the block only to arrive exactly at where I started.
Max and I have been walking dogs together this week. He keeps track of each of them and asks me each night in the car, “Allie or Louie, mom?” We walk for a half hour at a time, giving the dogs time to explore. We walk and find ourselves talking about things that never would have occured to us otherwise. About the smell of leaves or the mean kid at school or about why dogs talk to each other by peeing.
Its been cold this week. Brutally cold for Maryland in November and I wonder about dragging my son out in the evening for these walks. But Max rarely complains. He doesn’t even ask me anymore about why, why do we need to go. My answer is simple. We need to walk the dog because it needs to be done. Someone is ill, sick, in the hospital, tired. So we will go. That is how we are as a community. When one of us is out the other walks the dog. No big deal.
And it is no big deal. It is no fancy thing–no gourmet meal prepared, no major Herculean task. It is a walk, around the block reminding me that life goes on, and on and on. And when the bottom falls out, we can simply do more than keep it moving.
Jeff and Max off exploring new spaces at sunset.
Love is a messy thing.
Recently Max has felt pretty clingy and undone–there is so much swirl going on in our life–so much instability. Odette’s illness this fall really rocked his world, and the recent cancer diagnoses in our world have him feeling unstable, unsure and scared. He has been clinging to those he loves like a life raft. And he loves Jeff. Deeply.
Recently Max told me that he sometimes wished our friend Jeff was his dad. Not that long ago he told me that he felt like Jeff was his “second dad” and another time “just like a dad”. And suddenly, each time he utters the “d” word, I have come a bit undone myself.
Jeff plays a special role in Max’s life, one that is hard to define. They go swimming together and share a love for hockey. Jeff offers a safe lap for Max to crawl into when he is feeling a bit wounded. He tells stories and wrestles with Max. Jeff offers these gifts to so many of the kids in the neighborhood–he shows no favorites– but to Max the attention means so much more than it does to the others–the ones with dads that are home and involved. To Max the attention he gets from Jeff is love, pure and simple, and it fills up the empty places in his heart–the ones left vacant by a father who chooses not to be around so much.
And so over the course of many months and over the span of more than a year, we have all given into this love Max has for Jeff. We have started to live into it, letting it carry us along like a river. Its opened up new ways of seeing for me. Its made the world a little sweeter…a little lighter. Its allowed me to really believe that others will help me shepherd Max into independence and awaken to the fact that I am just chief among his many guides. Its transformed me and Max and how we relate to our whole community.
Normally, we manage this dance quite gracefully–this ancient village parenting style. I sometimes feel like I am captain of TeamMax–the larger group of our community that is trying to help Max find his way in this world.
But other times we find ourselves tripping up and stomping on each other’s wounded toes. The boundaries don’t feel obvious or neat. Its so hard without the titles that define our relationships to guide us. The titles that establish the rules and give us comfort. Titles like “dad”. So I could see why Max was desperate to assign one to the member of his extended tribe he loves most.
But Max’s use of the word “dad” sent up a thousand red flags for me. Mostly it triggered a great fear that Max would now create suffering in the most positive male relationship in his life because he would suddenly attach unrealistic expectations to it, expectations that Jeff wouldn’t be able to fulfill. I wasn’t sure exactly what “dad” meant to Max–but I was sure that at least a few of those qualifications Jeff would never meet–no matter how much he loves Max and no matter how much Max wants him to play that role.
And so I set about trying to set him straight or as straight as one can set anyone on this crooked path called life and to help him see the reality of this unusual situation. And in the course of it what I learned is that really, what Max wanted, the foundation of his wish, was simply to know that he was loved, that he is dear to Jeff and always would be. He needed assurances that no matter what storms came floating through our life that Jeff would not stop loving him. The only way he knew how to ask for unconditional love was to use the word “dad”.
But in exploring it with him I also learned that he had, in using the adopting the word “dad”, already started to inadvertently attach a slew of expectations that might if he holds onto them too tightly leave him disappointed…without setting Jeff up to fail him.
Truth is, I don’t know how to put this we have for Jeff in any box with a label either. In a world where we “friend” practical strangers on Facebook and assure our spouses that someone doesn’t mean much to us by saying, “they are just a friend”, the word friend seems completely and utterly inadequate. Yet every other term out there that we search for ranges from vaguely inauthentic to downright untrue. He is neither uncle nor brother, dad nor partner, stepfather, half-father, or coach. In many ways he could act like any of these things to either of us at any moment but really at the most fundamental and basic ways none of these labels apply at all.
At another time in my life, this lack of definition could have been a matter of great frustration, but as I lay tossing and turning this morning, it dawned on me that it was nothing short of a gift. For the truth is, whenever love seems to fit neatly into cleanly labeled boxes, we all set ourselves up to fail and immediately open the door to unending disappointment and complete and utter doom.
How many hours have any of us spent in therapy trying to sort out suffering and grief because our mother or father didn’t live up to our expectations of “Mother” or “Father”? How many years of hurt and pain arise from partners who don’t behave as we think partners should? How many times have brothers or sisters disappointed us when they did not rise to the occasion of the title that was granted to them simply by the accident of shared parentage? How many times have we missed the gifts given to us by our loved ones simply because we were looking for something else? I don’t know about you, but for me the number runs into the thousands…
But Jeff with his big open heart that does not neatly fit anywhere offers us the opportunity to stay in this open space of no definition, to love without labels, without explanations and without the code-words that ultimately trip us up.
Why do we need to tame love with labels? Instead of trying to define Jeff and our affection for him by using words like friend, brother or dad, why not just let it be what it is…and not try and name it?
It certainly means messy moments as we stumble along without a map. We are going to need to work to define the boundaries instead of having some word lazily do it for us. What does it mean to play this nameless role in our “tribe”? What is appropriate and comfortable? We are going to have to draw these lines ourselves over and over again from scratch. We are setting out to explore uncharted terrain and are not playing by templates. This is hard enough for a 39 year old woman to do..can I ask my child to come along on this ride? But when considering the consequences, the thousands of missed opportunities, how could I not?
That is hard and scary and makes my stomach do all sorts of flips. It calls for nothing short of raw naked authenticity of the bravest kind. It calls for fearlessness and trust and for the willingness to see things, not as we want them to be but how they are. It calls for a willingness to let go of everything including our expectations and hopes of being loved back…yipes.
Yet, something tells me, if I can, if Max can, if we can somehow learn to navigate the path of our love for Jeff without labeling it, without metaphors or similes, we just might be able to do it in all our relationships…or at least in some of our relationships. We can undo some of the hurt that was caused when the people we labeled failed us by not living up to that label. We can let go of our need to put people in little boxes. And then maybe we can open a tiny space for love to flow more freely. And then maybe, just maybe the world will have space to breathe and to heal, just a tiny wee bit.
Or maybe we will just end up here where we started. Simply Exploring. Without a map.
1. Sitting on the edge of the the water and watching the sun set with a glass of wine in my hand.
2. Making tea in a copper kettle.
3. Feeling the arms of my beloveds around me.
4. Lighting candles at the dinner table.
5. Hearing the rain and the wind on the windows.
6. Being on the Eastern Shore with my favorite people.
7. Knowing that I will come home to Odette, home at last from the hospital.
8. The light. The light. The beautiful golden autumn light.
9. Hungarian mushroom soup.
10. The Pogues…oh and Freddie King.
11. Knowing I am loved. Deeply loved.
What about you? What is making your heart sing this weekend?
I have a friend who is in a lot of pain. He doesn’t want to admit it. I think that he believes that if he slows down to see it that something awful will catch up with him, that he might have to face it, that he might even have to bear it.
I see the grimaces that he tries to pass off as his everyday smiles but I know the difference and can feel the chilly winds settle in now in this autumnal time of grief. I feel the shift the way a farmer knows the snow is coming. His impatience is palpable. He shrugs off my hugs, my soft offers of care with the clang bang clang of a blacksmith forging a shield, protection I suppose, though from this angle is is hard to see what is so big that it needs to be kept outside our circle.
When I call him on the grief that appears to be leaking through the cracks in the wall he has so carefully constructed around his heart, he turns to leave. I am his bell calling his attention to the pain he so desperately wants to ignore. He would rather not see me, hear me, even know me now. He leaves me standing there with my empty arms, the ones that meant to shelter him, held open. He rejects all that is good about me when he turns to go. To accept the gift I offer, the balm that could soothe the sting, means opening to the very wound that he fears will slay him. I am dangerous.
Sometimes I’d like to leave him out there, in the valley of despair all by himself if that is what he wishes. I long to wave goodbye to him and get on with my day, escaping the ugly icky feeling of being rejected.
But long ago I made a promise. I made it even though he doesn’t remember. The fact he doesn’t remember does not release me from its solemn vow. I whispered it in childhood to him lifetimes ago when we were small. I told him I would not leave, no matter what.
And so I take those empty arms of mine and stay as he runs, and he throws himself into this and that, as he distracts his throbbing heart as convinces himself the throb is just his heartbeat, that it does not exist, that it is all just fine. And I stand, quietly, not too far away, hoping that when he is tired he will allow himself a rest at last and there I will be with a shoulder. Maybe he will see me then. And maybe he will let me kiss his pain and release it.
Or maybe not. Perhaps he will continue to pretend not to see me with my gentle, healer’s hands. Nevertheless I will not abandon him. I will stay. Even when he hates me, I will stay.
I will not leave him all alone, for he is me, and I am him and the healer and the hurt are the same.
For my sweet, wise vibrant healer woman who dwells inside. The ancient part of my soul who never leaves me even when I have run far away, even though I have ignored her love for years. An ode to her voice and her patience. An answer to her call.
