Sixteen came and went. None of the usual fanfare, no car with a large bow parked in the drive, no huge surprise party BBQ designed to usher my sweet boy across the threshold of not-driving to driving. He can't technically drive yet, so maybe that's why this celebration felt muted and less elated than others. Maybe that celebration is one still to come.
But fifteen had been a year of holding breath. It started a few months before his birthday, his long lean frame and easy smile at times a startling reminder of Hunter, basketball held loosely under his arm at his side, his easy wave in the summer sunlight sending me right back to the day I last saw my brother in the rearview mirror on my way out of town. Fifteen was a year of a tension that sat at the back of my skull, low where the head meets the neck, an alertness of danger. Danger might come in the form of worry about how D was doing at school, whether he was happy or connected to friends and family, how he was feeling in this world of what feels like constant tension and would extend to a broader worry about the world and his place in it. This was all my tension, not his. "What if something happens to him?" my mind would ask as inopportune times of watching he and his friends play ball or when he'd walk away from the car in the morning. I'd find myself in frequent tears. I knew that my flood of emotions was unusual. It seemed at one point completely irrational and at another completely normal. There were a few times it bordered on a panic attack. Gratefully, I have good friends whose wisdom led me through those scared moments.
My therapist and I have talked a lot about the long ripple of trauma in life. When she first mentioned that losing my brother constituted trauma, I pushed back hard, "People have had horrible things happen to them, Darleen. This is life, this just happens." But she kept with it, explaining how trauma works, how my defining other people's trauma as "Big T" and mine as "Little t" was fine, but it was still trauma that required me to work through, process and come to a place of understanding the loss. I was reminded of Viktor Frankl's idea that pain has the property of gas let into a vessel, that no matter the amount of gas, it will fill the entire vessel. Trauma has these properties, it seems, and can linger longer than anyone ever realizes. You can work through it, you can observe it when it comes up and see it for what it is and, depending on where you are in your work, you can work on not allowing it to bring fear and anxiety into your every day that limits your living. In my case it was subtle and then it wasn't. My love and deepest respect to people who fight this every day.
This morning I was listening to an NPR piece on survivors of gun violence and the things that pop up in their lives. One woman interviewed noted that when her daughter contracted a disease she had to work through deep feelings of fear of losing her. That provoked this little blog post. One person's story sometimes reaches out to another to make them feel less alone.
There are a million complexities to losing a sibling, the shift of parent and child relationships, the ongoing loss felt in sibling relationships, the episodic and startlingly real feelings of recurrence and remembrance that startle the living and drive intense emotions. All during that 15th year, I would talk to David about those feelings, not so much to let him know that I was terrified something would happen to him (which I did, honestly, because I was) but because he has a gift for seeing the patterns and behaviors that exist around him. I wanted him to understand what was happening. And, in truth, he will know and love many people in his life who live with lingering trauma. We all do. We all need to know.
On the morning of his 16th birthday, I asked David what it felt like to be finally 16. "Pretty much the same," he said. And, after we'd been driving for a bit, he turned and asked me what it felt like for me. "It feels like exhaling, buddy. It feels like everything is going to be ok."
And it will be.
It will be.
Come what may.
(Happiest 16th to my beautiful son. 7/8)
/The book The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel Vanderkolk has been a real gift./
Showing posts with label origin stories. Show all posts
Showing posts with label origin stories. Show all posts
Wednesday, July 31, 2019
Thursday, October 15, 2015
The Theory of Everything (on a rutted road)
*not sure if the above pic is of Oklahoma, but man it looks like it.
The dirt in our neck of Oklahoma is thick and orangerust colored, beautiful for growing wheat but hell on wheels when it rains more than the ground can absorb. I have felt this, firsthand more than a few times, but most notably when Hunter and I went out for a "drive" (a.k.a. my 14 year old boarding school self sneaking off to smoke) only to get stuck up to the running boards of my 1968 beetle. Elbow-deep in that clay-shale mud, dragging armfuls of sticky paste away from the wheels and laying down wheat hay for traction, we were able to get that little car out of the ruts and back up onto the middle drier ground so we could creep our way home.
The ruts in Oklahoma rainy season are no joke, deep and jagged, the earth peels away in thick sheets and tire tracks push so deep that you worry about damaging the undercarriage of your car. You have two choices: to be in the ruts, go slowly, grind out the undercarriage and risk getting stuck or to find a way to flip your car up onto a space where you straddle the middle ground with one wheel while bouncing along the warshboard (yep, warshboard) side on the edge of the road with the other. One requires you to risk long term damage and breakdown, the other requires you to attend to what you are doing with laser attention, as falling back down into the ruts could cause damage worse than originally expected.
I first thought of this analogy when I was talking to a friend about behavior change in long term relationships, how it's so hard to change things when what you know is the rutted road, especially when you aren't sure if the road is going to change or get better or if this is it, turtles all the way down. It also applies to conditions in life that have locked you into patterns and beliefs and ways of being. "I'll just wait until the kids are out of high school to engage with the life I want to live" or "It's good some of the time, so until it gets really bad, I don't want to change ...(my job, my relationship, my habits)."
And so you keep going and going and going until one day you realize where you are, stuck in this wounding condition, and you can no longer bear it--the noise of the scraping and the tension of your arms having to hold the wheel straight. In essence, what you are doing to your very soul to stay locked in the pattern that is ultimately not where you need to be.
So you look for those few-and-far-between patches where the rut weaves and jags so you can work your wheels up onto the higher ground. And that getting up on the higher ground is not only difficult, but also in itself exhausting and unstable and new and naked. The ruts are easier to navigate but a painful destruction of your tender unexposed side, the higher ground scarier but ultimately probably better for long-term sustainability--the reality is that you just. don't. know. The truth is that sometimes you are in it and you don't want to be, but getting out of the car and into the thick muck on foot is not an option, you just have to ride it until it's done, wherever that leaves you.
I sat across from my dear girl Lara the other night laying out this Theory of Everything (on a rutted road), each of us feeling it in our hearts for the painful relationships we've been through, realizing also that this is just part of the human condition of change in life overall, from losing our mothers to thinking about our best selves and those parts of ourselves still waiting to be born. And we are still learning, and choosing, all of us.
Thursday, March 26, 2015
Eye trained on the sky
As part of the writing workshop with Cheryl Strayed (right?!), she offered us a series of prompts to consider. Here's one...
Create a summary of who you are.
There was Leo and Cygnus and Cassiopiea. And Draco and Virgo and Libra. But most of all I remember turning my face to the heavens and finding the points that made the handle and cup of Ursa Major. Alkaid, Mizar, Alcor, Alioth, Megrez, Phecda, Merak and Dubhe, names I didn’t know then, flat on my back, my skinny brown legs held fast against the earth in my 7th year.
The sky over my hometown was always lit with stars, as far as you could see, the light pollution of larger cities far away. To my untrained eye and not scientific mind, the nighttime sky was a blur, an ocean of light, awash, save for the handle and cup, the only way I could get my bearings in the canopy of the world.
And 7 turned into 17, my world increasingly complex. I was a failing high school student, newly fatherless, with sexual agency beyond my years, drunk on new freedom, coors light beer and the possibility contained in a thick course catalog from my newly matriculated university that I read like a bible. The stars were dimmed by the Dallas lights but vibrant on the road between Dallas and San Antonio where Sha and I steered her big gold cadillac into the night. Or Dallas to Houston. Or Dallas to Austin, fueled by our own sense of finding ourselves.
Those years felt ungrounded, unfixed, too much and too big. Unmoored, unskilled at navigating the map without an understanding of where I needed to go, 17 became 21 became 25 became 31, with mountaintops and oceans and foreign lands and jobs and wandering, so much wandering, in between.
I did not fully know then, as I am just beginning to learn now in my 44th year, that I am capable of making sense of the stars, of orienting myself within the blur, of understanding the anchors in the sea of light. That in the universe of stars, and in the universe of life, it’s less about a roadmap and more about points of bearing. For a person who has sought the map, who has felt (and currently brutally feels) that the road is being made right before her feet, this is a revelation. Maybe it’s about integration instead of a specific direction. Maybe it’s about weaving the body, the mind and the mojo, understanding the landscape of possibility instead of a fixed horizon. Maybe the point of exploring is to understand where you are at any given point in time, but not be tethered by a specific path. Look at how well the explorers did when they thought they knew the way, but look at how they successfully navigated a way home by casting their eyes heavenward, trusting their bearings written in the night sky.
Saturday, September 22, 2012
What is Essential is Invisible to the Eye
Today I smell like dirt and sweaty-ness and deliberation. My feet hurt from standing too long looking at shades of my childhood spread out on tables in my aunt's new home while my lungs cough up dust from brown-filmed boxes kept in basements too long.
My sisters and I are wrapping up the final stages of the Great Dividing of Things, a summer's worth of sorting and selecting from my mother, grandmother and aunt's possessions that will come to reside in our own homes. The Great Dividing has been intense, not because we have fought or wrung our hands over these things. In contrast, we three have managed to be loving and thoughtful of each other in our system, only wincing once or twice at losing a much-loved item to another.
No, the Great Dividing has been intense because we are women who carry so much of who we knew in the things we can touch and feel. Grandma's glassware reminds me of strawberries and cream breakfasts on early morning wakings in her beautiful home. My mother's shotgun, a favorite bronze statue, the bold charcoal strokes of a favorite auntie's talented hand: all comfortable reminders of a home that will no longer be here for us in its present form. Often simple things become exceptionally beautiful for the story behind it...a sweet Victorian biscuit holder becomes even more cool knowing that Dad and Aunt Pat bought it while in Europe together and a salt and pepper shaker set becomes more valuable when it was brought from the Old World by people we never knew but who in some way relate to our present being. It's a struggle not to make everything meaningful, to not drag too much forward for the sake of holding on to people who have left too soon and to places that are no longer your own.
And through this process, I have begun to realize just how important this essential nature of things is for me. A week ago I began to re-read a copy of The Bone People, underlined and dog-eared by my 20-something self that reminded me of the sometimes-lost but fundamentally strong woman I had been then. I wear Mala beads made by my gorgeous friend Molly and am soothed by their smoothness and her power during a stressful meeting. I have my own ritual of rereading a new copy of my favorite book before I give it to a friend just to imprint my own feelings, energy and intention in its pages. There are things that are in every way precious to me because of the thought or intention with which they were created or loved or given to me. In rough times, these are the glue, the touchstones, the cairns on the journey.
It's the feel, the smell, the thought, the history of person's imprint on an object that makes it special. It's holding something that's been held by the person you love. It's the essence of the person connected to you peering through, the heartstrings that it tugs, the feeling of knowing yourself there that it provides.
*********************
Rifling through my closet, I reached back to find an old sweater of my mother's that I'd brought home after she died. She'd been gone for over a year but her warm, achingly familiar scent still remained mixed in the soft fibers as I buried my nose deep and drew in her memory. "Mijo!" I called to David, "come here". Without a word, I held out the sweater for him to smell. Drawing back, eyes shining and face flooded with memories, he smiled and said "Grandma Suz." Oh, sweet boy, that we can hold on to that, that we can, that we can, that we can.
My sisters and I are wrapping up the final stages of the Great Dividing of Things, a summer's worth of sorting and selecting from my mother, grandmother and aunt's possessions that will come to reside in our own homes. The Great Dividing has been intense, not because we have fought or wrung our hands over these things. In contrast, we three have managed to be loving and thoughtful of each other in our system, only wincing once or twice at losing a much-loved item to another.
No, the Great Dividing has been intense because we are women who carry so much of who we knew in the things we can touch and feel. Grandma's glassware reminds me of strawberries and cream breakfasts on early morning wakings in her beautiful home. My mother's shotgun, a favorite bronze statue, the bold charcoal strokes of a favorite auntie's talented hand: all comfortable reminders of a home that will no longer be here for us in its present form. Often simple things become exceptionally beautiful for the story behind it...a sweet Victorian biscuit holder becomes even more cool knowing that Dad and Aunt Pat bought it while in Europe together and a salt and pepper shaker set becomes more valuable when it was brought from the Old World by people we never knew but who in some way relate to our present being. It's a struggle not to make everything meaningful, to not drag too much forward for the sake of holding on to people who have left too soon and to places that are no longer your own.
And through this process, I have begun to realize just how important this essential nature of things is for me. A week ago I began to re-read a copy of The Bone People, underlined and dog-eared by my 20-something self that reminded me of the sometimes-lost but fundamentally strong woman I had been then. I wear Mala beads made by my gorgeous friend Molly and am soothed by their smoothness and her power during a stressful meeting. I have my own ritual of rereading a new copy of my favorite book before I give it to a friend just to imprint my own feelings, energy and intention in its pages. There are things that are in every way precious to me because of the thought or intention with which they were created or loved or given to me. In rough times, these are the glue, the touchstones, the cairns on the journey.
It's the feel, the smell, the thought, the history of person's imprint on an object that makes it special. It's holding something that's been held by the person you love. It's the essence of the person connected to you peering through, the heartstrings that it tugs, the feeling of knowing yourself there that it provides.
*********************
Rifling through my closet, I reached back to find an old sweater of my mother's that I'd brought home after she died. She'd been gone for over a year but her warm, achingly familiar scent still remained mixed in the soft fibers as I buried my nose deep and drew in her memory. "Mijo!" I called to David, "come here". Without a word, I held out the sweater for him to smell. Drawing back, eyes shining and face flooded with memories, he smiled and said "Grandma Suz." Oh, sweet boy, that we can hold on to that, that we can, that we can, that we can.
Friday, November 18, 2011
Having it all
"C'mon, Mama!" he yells, "our song is on!" Sure enough, the thump-thump-thump beat meets me as I head up the stairs. I find him in his bedroom, his sweet dark eyes shining as he pauses to belt out the lyrics
I throw my hands up in the air sometimes
Saying AYO!
Gotta let go!
I wanna celebrate and live my life
Saying AYO!
Baby, let's go!
with such earnestness that I want to grab him and smother him in a huge hug. He works his wiry, muscly frame around nearly (but not exactly) to the beat of the music. He's learned a few new moves from his friends, I suspect, which include a bit of a football player's blocking jam and a frat boy fist pumping "rock on" kind of expression. It's adorable.
God, I love this kid.
We shout the lyrics to each other, smiling that this is our favorite song together (of the moment), the enjoyment of serious, hard dancing taking us both out of whatever else exists for the moment.
The first time I heard him sing these lyrics I thought "You're 8. What in the world do you have to throw your hands up in the air about? And what is this about celebrating and living your life? You are 8. What's that about?" It was in the space the before my diagnosis, before the reality of having a parent in cancer treatment would invade our family, before his daily "how was your day, Mama?" became code for "did you feel ok today?" or "how did the chemo go?"
This cancer experience sits deep with this little guy. Patient through my bad moods, thoughtful and helpful when I haven't felt well, David is 100% a trooper. He's a kid that keeps things inside, handles things at his own pace, asks questions after you create the space for more questions. It takes some prompting.
I will never forget the day that we told the kids that I had breast cancer. We were heading back to Rhode Island to see family and knew that we needed to tell the kids for fear that they might overhear something and be confused. Driving that 45 minute stretch to the airport seemed like the best option. We turned onto the highway, I turned to Nick and said "let's go" and he began.
He said "Guys, we need to talk about something. Mom got some news about her health that we need to talk about. She just found out that she's sick. It's nothing that you can catch and she's going to be ok, she's going to have to take some medicine and have some surgery."
I had been scared to bring this up, so incredibly close after my mother's own death from lung cancer. David and Ava had seen my mom just days before she died, when she was in no way herself, thin and incoherent so close to death.
Standing at my mother's bedside, they clung to us; David's face buried in my belly, Ava crying into Nick's shoulder saying "That's not my grandma". They knew too well how cancer could ravage a person. I knew that the connection was just too close.
"What kind of sickness does she have, Dada?" David said.
"She's got cancer, David," Nick said.
You could have heard a pin drop. I turned around to look at them both and said "It's not like Grandma Suz's cancer, David. I am going to be fine, it's not the same thing. Don't worry."
And then my sweet, sweet boy let out a long, slow and soft whistle of relief and my heart broke completely open. No child should have to hear this, I thought. No child should have to hear that his mom has cancer. His momentary fear and subsequent feeling of relief was palpable.
I tried to get him to talk over the weekend, to ask some questions and let some things out. He refused. He really didn't want to talk about it. You could see in his eyes that he was really scared and playing off that he wasn't. Ava, on the other hand, was a non-stop question machine. "What happens with cancer? What will happen to you? Will it hurt? What do they do? How will you feel?..." Endless questions.
On the flight home, I used his little sister's inquisitive and fearless orientation as bait. As we sat on the plane together, I said "You know, D, Ava's had some great questions about my being sick." "She has?" he responded, "what kind of questions did she ask?" So we went through Ava's list of questions and what I told her. We talked for the full hour and a half about what was going to happen, what he was worried about, what I was worried about, how treatment worked. He finally said "Well, at least you won't lose your hair." That part, and the reality of it, I think made him saddest of all.
The guy sitting behind us had a bird's eye view of our conversation and as we all stood up at the end, he said "I don't think I've ever heard a better conversation between a mother and son about such a difficult subject. You have an amazing kid on your hands there." Damn straight.
Ava runs into the group to catch the last few verses of the song and we all three sing the lines of the song that mean the most to me:
I'm gonna take it all like
I'm gonna be the last one standing
...
Cause I, I, Believe it
And I, I, I
I just want it all, I just want it all
And it really strikes me. I do want it all.
"All" now has come down to a pretty narrow set of things.
I want to be here for these children for as long as I can, to get to know them deeply as people and be amazed at how they grow. I want to be healthy and happy and curious about life.
I want time. That is all.
I want to believe that I can be the last one standing, against the odds, dancing with my children years from now at their weddings. It's not so much to ask, and it's not so much to expect when you look into the eyes of these little people who need a mom.
So the next leg of this journey is fulfilling that promise, that expectation. The next leg is setting myself up to have it all--even in this modified space of what all might mean.
Check this kid out. Wouldn't you?
I throw my hands up in the air sometimes
Saying AYO!
Gotta let go!
I wanna celebrate and live my life
Saying AYO!
Baby, let's go!
with such earnestness that I want to grab him and smother him in a huge hug. He works his wiry, muscly frame around nearly (but not exactly) to the beat of the music. He's learned a few new moves from his friends, I suspect, which include a bit of a football player's blocking jam and a frat boy fist pumping "rock on" kind of expression. It's adorable.
God, I love this kid.
We shout the lyrics to each other, smiling that this is our favorite song together (of the moment), the enjoyment of serious, hard dancing taking us both out of whatever else exists for the moment.
The first time I heard him sing these lyrics I thought "You're 8. What in the world do you have to throw your hands up in the air about? And what is this about celebrating and living your life? You are 8. What's that about?" It was in the space the before my diagnosis, before the reality of having a parent in cancer treatment would invade our family, before his daily "how was your day, Mama?" became code for "did you feel ok today?" or "how did the chemo go?"
This cancer experience sits deep with this little guy. Patient through my bad moods, thoughtful and helpful when I haven't felt well, David is 100% a trooper. He's a kid that keeps things inside, handles things at his own pace, asks questions after you create the space for more questions. It takes some prompting.
I will never forget the day that we told the kids that I had breast cancer. We were heading back to Rhode Island to see family and knew that we needed to tell the kids for fear that they might overhear something and be confused. Driving that 45 minute stretch to the airport seemed like the best option. We turned onto the highway, I turned to Nick and said "let's go" and he began.
He said "Guys, we need to talk about something. Mom got some news about her health that we need to talk about. She just found out that she's sick. It's nothing that you can catch and she's going to be ok, she's going to have to take some medicine and have some surgery."
I had been scared to bring this up, so incredibly close after my mother's own death from lung cancer. David and Ava had seen my mom just days before she died, when she was in no way herself, thin and incoherent so close to death.
Standing at my mother's bedside, they clung to us; David's face buried in my belly, Ava crying into Nick's shoulder saying "That's not my grandma". They knew too well how cancer could ravage a person. I knew that the connection was just too close.
"What kind of sickness does she have, Dada?" David said.
"She's got cancer, David," Nick said.
You could have heard a pin drop. I turned around to look at them both and said "It's not like Grandma Suz's cancer, David. I am going to be fine, it's not the same thing. Don't worry."
And then my sweet, sweet boy let out a long, slow and soft whistle of relief and my heart broke completely open. No child should have to hear this, I thought. No child should have to hear that his mom has cancer. His momentary fear and subsequent feeling of relief was palpable.
I tried to get him to talk over the weekend, to ask some questions and let some things out. He refused. He really didn't want to talk about it. You could see in his eyes that he was really scared and playing off that he wasn't. Ava, on the other hand, was a non-stop question machine. "What happens with cancer? What will happen to you? Will it hurt? What do they do? How will you feel?..." Endless questions.
On the flight home, I used his little sister's inquisitive and fearless orientation as bait. As we sat on the plane together, I said "You know, D, Ava's had some great questions about my being sick." "She has?" he responded, "what kind of questions did she ask?" So we went through Ava's list of questions and what I told her. We talked for the full hour and a half about what was going to happen, what he was worried about, what I was worried about, how treatment worked. He finally said "Well, at least you won't lose your hair." That part, and the reality of it, I think made him saddest of all.
The guy sitting behind us had a bird's eye view of our conversation and as we all stood up at the end, he said "I don't think I've ever heard a better conversation between a mother and son about such a difficult subject. You have an amazing kid on your hands there." Damn straight.
Ava runs into the group to catch the last few verses of the song and we all three sing the lines of the song that mean the most to me:
I'm gonna take it all like
I'm gonna be the last one standing
...
Cause I, I, Believe it
And I, I, I
I just want it all, I just want it all
And it really strikes me. I do want it all.
"All" now has come down to a pretty narrow set of things.
I want to be here for these children for as long as I can, to get to know them deeply as people and be amazed at how they grow. I want to be healthy and happy and curious about life.
I want time. That is all.
I want to believe that I can be the last one standing, against the odds, dancing with my children years from now at their weddings. It's not so much to ask, and it's not so much to expect when you look into the eyes of these little people who need a mom.
So the next leg of this journey is fulfilling that promise, that expectation. The next leg is setting myself up to have it all--even in this modified space of what all might mean.
Check this kid out. Wouldn't you?
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