On change, fear, and surrender
I got the feeling last night when I was driving home. Home. Unplugged.
It happened as I rounded the corner onto Harkness, a few blocks away from my nearly empty place. We had to leave a few things that didn’t fit into the truck, and the cat who wouldn’t come out of hiding when the moving truck left. I felt the pop—when you pull the cord out of the wall and the light goes off.
It’s time.
This whole week I have been all over the place to get the new house settled and to attend to and hold space for my daughter as she struggles with all this change. Swiping the tears into my hairline as I sit with her, listening, reflecting, trying so damn hard to push my own feelings into the background. Frustration. Exhaustion. Grief. Gratitude. Surrender.
It all hurts more than I want to admit. There have been so many times in this house over the last 3 years that I’ve swiped the tears to my hairline as I sat with my daughter, fought with my daughter, grieved helplessly as she struggled through recovering traumatic memories and spiraling into self-harm, substance abuse, suicidality and depression. The structures of my life, that I am somehow healthy enough to change, held me, tenuously, but held me. Dismantling anything that existed through that time feels terrifying. Like all the secrets these empty walls held like layers of paper mache will now be revealed. The secrets of just how bad it got. Of just how close we came to losing her.
As I sit and write, I’m on the foldout couch, lying on towels I pulled out of a moving box, in a borrowed blanket, my leftover cat next to me. I’m swiping the tears into my hairline again. I’m staring at the empty stairwell, where over five years ago my little girl ran up, looked around, came back down to the landing and said, “Mom, this is the one!” The house we were meant to have. Little did I know that 3 years later I would be guiding that little girl down these same stairs, bracing her so she didn’t collapse as her body shut down, rushing her to the hospital.
Sometimes life is messy and nothing makes that go away except… change. Change that is especially challenging because it reveals all the places we didn’t let ourselves feel. All the times we swiped the tears into the hairline instead of letting them fall to our laps and become an ocean of sadness.
Sometimes there’s no time to dwell, and maybe sometimes it’s okay to let it all fall apart, to let it be exactly as it is. To stop managing the experience for others. To stop using the word “but” and “just” to minimize the intensity of our experience (It’s hard, but I’m fine). To stop placating others and ourselves. To allow ourselves the gift of not having to make ourselves okay. And maybe then we can all be a little more alike and a lot less alone.
