At 16, We Exhale

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./

Winnowing

Somehow this is not how you envisioned it, midday grey skies coaxing through the windows that you notice are in need of polishing before the people come to look at what is there. You envisioned bourbon in glasses and smoke and arms fisted up into clenched hands wrestling over who gets what. But it's not that. It's a Monday and you are starting with the bigger things when your partner of so many years lays it out for you. There isn't a lot there, honestly. Extracting the family pieces that you've either dragged with you or recently dragged in, there's not a lot there worth keeping. Old mattress 10 years on that may need replacing (that saw both of your children home), bunk beds the kids no longer want, too many items from IKEA to warrant a move across half of the nation. Save a few pieces of furniture, all of the accumulated knick knacks and a heavy lift in the kitchen, glassware and dishes, there simply is not much there. Easier to pitch it, give it away, parse it out and buy anew than to spend what it would take to bring it along.

You are not ready for the gut-punch that this brings, the sudden thought of this person you've been with for so long starting a life with barely a trace of his old, your history's imprint erased from the smooth arms of the chair, wiped clean off of the glasses, not nuanced in the myriad of future choices he would make about his accommodated life. But it's not the you being erased that is the gut-punch, it's the history, it's the together, the starting over and moving on.

And for the next few hours, you ruminate over what investment means in a marriage. What not having a lot in common to divide up means. You want to lift this metaphor into the narrative of your marriage, to use it as a tool to make your case. It's proof, you think, because the bigger truth is your heart is sore, because accumulating/not accumulating objects feels like it should mean something, because after 14 years you expected more to be there, because you can't quite erase the image of your partner's back entering a home, not your home, to start anew.

You would be foolish to leave your thinking there, so you don't. You remember hours in the garden, great meals in the kitchen, small people at soccer games and school board meetings and graduate school. You remember moving and packing and unpacking and fishing trips and the long stretch of time that this house you are leaving has afforded you during beautiful summer weather and magnificent fall leaves.  Fourteen years, not measured in big things you bought, slippery to hold onto save for the two bright and amazing beings the world will delight to receive someday. Slippery to hold on to save the small objects from faraway places that you hope his future partner won't ask to remove, the pieces that were too beautiful to let go of, the pictures you stack to split up, the wedding invitations you set aside for the kids, the bags and boxes of life moved through that you haul to the curb. It's all there for the viewing, all of the miles and years of hopeful emotions that you relive in each pile, your heart too soft for this work of winnowing what's worth keeping and what's worth leaving behind.

Gravity pulls us back

My mother and I had a sticky relationship. Two people could not have been more different in many ways, our political beliefs unbending, our ways of arguing about things loud and confrontational. This was years in the making, journeying through high school and college and beyond up until the weeks preceding her death when the soft reality of a short time gave us the space to not so much talk things through, but just to be attentive to the love that we had for each other, the love that underwrote all these things.

People that know about my hard relationship with my mom always wonder, sometimes aloud, sometimes with their eyes, about how we wrapped things up. I shuffle my feet a bit, uncomfortable with the question that implies what it does, that we wasted many years in disharmony only to be robbed of a future together.

But in these past few years that my mother has been gone, I have realized that our relationship was what it was and would have continued to be so until something catastrophic happened that would have changed everything. And then likely changed nothing.

Because behavior in relationships is incredibly difficult to change. The gravity of the well-worn path pulls us back to what we know and are accustomed to, even if it's not what we want in our heart of hearts. That pattern may be the inability to admit that we are wrong or the hurt at another freezing us out. It may be the lack of courage to have hard conversations, to say that we are sorry, operate on a different level and in a different behavior pattern than we had before. But it's just really hard. And it may not mean that we don't love the other person, it may mean that we just don't have the capacity to make that change. Changing behavior in relationships takes time and near constant attention. It takes intention and tending. False starts and failures chip away at the surface. Sometimes it feels safer not to even start. Sometimes the disappointment feels like more than we can bear.

And you can live the rest of your life sick to your stomach that this never happened, riddled with guilt that you squandered your time with something so precious as your mother's time in your life. You can let that eat away at you, blame yourself, wonder what you could have done. Or you can realize, as so many relationships in life, that it was what it was, mine the time that you had for the good, push past the regrets and move forward. You can take this realization into your relationships that are alive today, have expectations for people and for yourself, live according to what you need and how you need to be loved and to recognize your own role in how that all works out. Because that is what she would have wanted, honestly. I think she'd appreciate that most.