Finding Mom

Sometimes a day is needed just to process everything that has been happening (at least, if you’re a highly sensitive, introverted type), or to recover.  Today is one of those days.  Yesterday, it was one year since the day I felt that I needed to go check on my mom at lunch.  The siblings hadn’t been able to get her on the phone over the weekend, and she hadn’t returned calls since then which was very unusual.  Knowing that the last time we were worried because we couldn’t reach her, my sister went to check and found that Mom had been out playing piano for her ladies’ group High Tea, I still kept feeling I needed to go.  It was that little voice, saying “don’t wait” that I decided to follow.

My brother and I got into Mom’s house and found her half on the couch, eyes open but not responsive.   I had a lot of experience with getting ready for an ambulance to arrive, with my ex-husband’s illness in past years, so I gathered all her meds.  My brother and I were calm and headed over to the ER behind the ambulance.  Mom had apparently fallen, probably three days earlier, and hit her head.  The warfarin that she’d been taking contributed to a massive brain bleed.   She was dressed nicely, for church apparently, and had been to the theater in town the day before that. We think, and I hope, that she was unaware and out of pain within minutes of the fall.  After about a week in the hospital, when we realized that there was going to be no improvement, we honored her wishes and took her off life support.  Within eighteen hours, she died.

That’s as straightforward and detached as I can be in telling the story.  A few weeks before Mom’s fall, the boys and I were visiting and we talked about her choice to stay in her house.  She seemed to brace herself, as we’d all expressed concern that something would happen and that we would have to come and find her in a bad way.  I had told her that I would come:  “I’m tough, I can take it!” I said, half joking, then emphasized that I wasn’t in any hurry to be tested on it.  I’d touched her hand, and held here eyes and she said “thank you.”

As hard as it was, I am so glad that I was moved to go check on my mom that day, that I was able to honor that promise.  It was my gift to here, to take on something painful if it meant that she could live as she chose.  I am sure she knew it wasn’t going to be too far in the future; I honestly think that she and our Lord had come to some understanding in her prayer and meditation time. Because I was sober for just six months at that time, because I rely on God for clarity and strength, I was able to be perfectly present in the moment I was speaking with Mom, and to keep moving through the days after we found her there at home.

Today’s mental health day, a day taken off from work is to catch up on sleep, to sort through feelings and memories.  There’s still a cost for that gift, and I’m still glad to have been healthy enough to give it.  There’s no trade off for the worry I’d caused Mom over the years, and I wasn’t trying to make anything up.  I just love you, Mom, and I am so glad I had the opportunity to give you an assurance for your peace and to follow through on it.

In the Middle of It

When you are in the middle of a story, it isn’t a story at all, but only a dark confusion; a dark roaring, a blindness, a wreckage of shattered glass and splintered wood; like a house in a whirlwind, or else a boat crushed by the icebergs, or swept over the rapids and all aboard powerless to stop it.  It’s only afterwards that it becomes anything like story at all.  When you are telling it, to yourself or to someone else.

– Margaret Atwood, in Alias Grace (Chapter 33)

I’ve realized lately that one thing I love about books and movies is that ability to see how the different parts influence and absorb, how things resolve.  In life, we don’t often get to see that.  It can be so easy to feel and to believe that we’re not moving toward anything but merely running on a wheel or plodding daily through events with no progress.

In trauma or crisis, it feels like there is no movement.  If we’re clear enough to think about how things could be better, the distance between the here of the situation and the there of the goal might as well be the distance between Earth and Mars.  Still, there comes a day when things have changed enough that we can hardly believe it.  In AA, the focus is on one day at a time.  After a lot of days, you can usually see a whole lot of changes that were nearly imperceptible as they were happening.  Picture a long steady climb up a mountain, when you can’t see your ascent until you’ve gone a long way and come around a bend

What could I say to encourage someone else, to say “You can do this!  It’s hard, and I can’t reach back with my hands and pull you from where you are to where I am but begin!  It will be worth it!”  Whatever your journey, whether it’s an unhealthy or abusive relationship (or pattern of relationships), alcohol or drug abuse, loss and grief, a divorce… what makes it possible to move forward rather than numbing out?

I suggest that you start with compassion.  I can picture the attentive expression on the face of a woman counselor, the way she would pause as I spilled some secret or described something I regretted.  She would ask me if I had a best friend and how would I advise that friend in similar circumstances.  It always came down to compassion which had to begin as compassion for self.

Other sources at the time carried a similar message.  That idea that we can bully and browbeat ourselves with mental self-flagellation is a colossal error.  Call it a maladaptation, call it a lie of Satan, call it anything you like, it doesn’t work!  The more I tried out the idea that being kind to myself really was the first part of The Golden Rule, the braver I felt and the more I could effectively practice changes.

So, begin with compassion and be sure that includes yourself.  Think of the best encouragement you would have for your best friend and try it out in your life.  Do that for a couple of weeks, and see if you don’t have more clarity and more energy.  See the changes start to happen.

The Unreal Never Is

For the past two days I have thought about how to write about an experience.  On the one hand, I have my safe, fairly anonymous blog in which to share.  On the other, I am encouraged to connect this space with my Facebook, with the people I actually see in my life.  The two have been mostly separate, so far.  That was intentional, starting in the days when safety was a very valid concern.

Here it is:  the other day, I took my boys to a funeral in their dad’s family.  It wasn’t long before I realized that no one knew about the divorce, and in fact had heard different stories about the boys going to a private prep school, and about me being out of town for work.

I don’t know if the creative representations are outright lies or the result of an inability to face things as they are.  I went knowing the potential for it to be awkward.  There is something paralyzing, though, about showing up where no one knows the real you, where there’s this part for you to play without your agreement to play a part.  I felt like a prop, not a person.  Still, I decided it was not a place to make a scene, and I was primarily there for the boys.

I did speak with a handful of people, and let them know that it’s been five years since the divorce.  I opted to stick with the plain truth as it pertains to me.  It wasn’t my objective to expose someone else’s fictions or fantasy life, but it sure isn’t my obligation to participate in them, either.

The Unreal never is, the Real never is not.  ~ the Bhagavad Gita

I’m waiting for the fallout.  I fully expect to be asked why I had to say anything. As if I need a defense for the plain truth. I remember those days, of being unsure if I knew what was real and what wasn’t.  Too often a simple reference to ordinary pieces in life brought on arguments because it raised questions.  The accusations of deliberately trying to cause embarrassment.  Wondering if I had done something wrong.  Worse, I would wonder ,if there could be two completely different representations of how things are, if I might be the one who was deceiving myself.   It took a long while to trust myself again.

It was a little bit like a visit to a past I’m glad to leave behind.  I thought about the days when my counselor would remind me that the small, small steps that were needed to start the journey might seem to be going nowhere, but after a while you look back and see that you have come a good way.  It is a good way.  Maybe I won’t link the blog to FB today, but soon.

No matter how difficult and painful it may be, nothing sounds as good to the soul as the truth. ~ Martha Beck, Leaving the Saints

Feeling Bad Can Be Good

There are different kinds of feeling bad, and when something feels wrong deep down in our bodies then we need to pay attention to that.  Today, I have a different kind of feeling that’s uncomfortable and restless.  There is a resistance to change that doesn’t recognize whether doing something different is good, or even fantastic, only that it is different.  Different is scary, it’s unfamiliar, it must be avoided.  There’s a backlash that says “go back to watching TV after work or playing endless rounds of Spider Solitaire on your phone, stay numb, don’t try to break into a life that could be extraordinary.  You must be tired, go to sleep…”   Maybe your backlash likes to suggest more shopping, or more alcohol, or more ice cream.  If we could just channel some of the energy we put into avoidance, into daring to try we would get so far.

I have navigated enough recovery, enough positive change in my life that when I recognize this particular feeling, I know I might as well cheer.  Yes!  I am doing something brave enough for it to be uncomfortable, challenging enough to get adrenaline going.  NO WAY am I going to give up now!  It may mean I need to talk to someone I trust or spend some extra time in my journal to investigate if there is anything I do need to reconsider, but it doesn’t mean stop.  It says to me, “Hunker down and press on!  You’re getting somewhere!”

How do we know when it’s a BAD feeling, or a nervous, scared, this-is-just-different feeling?  Hmmm… for me, I think the difference is that this anxious feeling, the one that can be good, is more like a buzzing in my head with a non-specific edginess, and tends to nudge me toward numbing out in one way or another.  Bad-that-needs-attention settles just under or behind my chest, and it stimulates rather than lulls.  Of course, I wouldn’t know that if I didn’t have some experience with both.  Listen.  Pay attention.  Pray, or meditate (or both).  It gets easier to know the difference.  You’ll see.

An Excellent Plan

It sounded an excellent plan, no doubt, and very neatly and simply arranged; the only difficulty was, that she had not the smallest idea how to set about it.

I have only read Alice in Wonderland (along with Through the Looking Glass, its sequel) a handful of times, so it surprised me how often something that Alice said comes to mind and fits exactly what I’m thinking and feeling.  For years, or at least at different times over many years, I have felt just as Alice did.  At this moment in Wonderland, she has grown so large that her body sticks out of the rabbit’s house, and she wonders what might make her smaller again in this strange world.  It is like the dream I sometimes have, that it’s mid-semester at school and I’ve realized there’s a class that I’ve somehow failed to attend even once, and I may never catch up so that I’ll pass.  You have an anxiety dream along those lines, don’t you?

Behind, behind and trying to catch up, or knowing that there is work to be done without knowing how to get to the starting line.   It never occurs to me in the dream that I might ask for help.  Truthfully, it took years for me to learn to ask in real life, too.  Just recently,  I responded to an offer for an introductory strategizing call for coaching/mentoring in creating a life around my purpose.   The acceleration in seeing my way to setting about the next phase in life is exhilarating and terrifying!  The doubts come:  I started dabbling in blogging about six years ago, and look at how little I’ve done!  What makes me think I’ll do better now?  What makes me think I have anything new to say?  Who do I think I am?  All that.

But in the past years, I have had several companions in my journey, some of whom served as guides for a period of time and some who just joined me for a moment to impart a word of support or direction.  I know I don’t have The Answer for any one person, but I might have a word that will encourage you to keep searching, or an experience that helps you recognize a clue in the journey that you are taking.  With the collaboration of this new coach in my life, I am ready for a stretch that is going to be full-steam ahead!  At the same time, I am looking back over the times when I seemed to be getting nowhere with compassion.  I forgive myself for that time so that I can move forward now.  I can’t wait to see what comes next!