On my mind…

Written May 2019

I’m back at the library where I used to come and write while my oldest had academy one afternoon a week. Someone tried to blow it up in the fall in our privileged, white person town: no joke. It’s been closed while they worked on repairing the car parkade and cleaned each and every thing in the whole building. It feels shiny and new and people aren’t used to it being open again. The parkade is deserted and I have no problem finding a reading cubby where I open my computer and try to think of some words to write. I wonder how many people are scared it may happen again, even though the white male who brought the bomb died. I think it’s important for me to point that out because I know many people when they think of bombing think about minority immigrants. This man was no immigrant and he was no minority: he grew up around here, on a farm I think. Anger and hatred and lack of connection and empathy don’t often care where you grew up, in fact I would argue they are more prevalent in a privileged group who considers themselves to be persecuted.

I’m doing my morning pages in my journal still most days and most days those are all the words I have time to get down. Midlife is beautiful and glorious and also busy. We live somewhere where two incomes are certainly nice to have, if not almost necessary so I’m trying to cram as much paid work in as I can, while also homeschooling three kids, running another business and managing things like flooding basements, broken wells and getting groceries. I don’t work anywhere close to full time for pay - more like 1/5 time when things are really busy but all the work I do not for money, especially choosing to homeschool add up, especially with a husband who travels extensively for work.

Things that are on my mind right now are things I don’t really want to share about on the internet. What it’s like to have a house full of kids turning into teenagers, what it is like to raise a competitive athlete, how our life seems bananas but yet I cannot imagine it any other way. How to educate my kids for high school. How I don’t want my kids to be a part of teen cell phone culture and they aren’t but then also the effects of them not being a part of it. The positive and the negative. I’m wondering about how to raise younger siblings who feel just as accomplished (read loved) when your oldest is incredibly driven. On how this morning I found lily beetles for the first time in my yard and how climate change means two of my apple trees and my one plum didn’t get any blossoms on them at all. At how I feel sick at the amount of plastic we are throwing away yet I still really want to eat berries and go for a slurpee without having reusable cups on us. How girls are almost expected to post ridiculous photos of themselves online and how my middle dances with girls older than her and how I’m not sure how I feel about that these days. The difference between 11 and 13 can be extreme. How I feel guilt that some of my kids seem permanently altered by the fact that I had cancer during their childhood. If there is anything I can do about it. On my incredible sadness at seeing the actions of my sons black teammates being more likely to interpreted as aggressive or hostile or with intent than my white, blond, blue eyed son’s are and how I don’t know how to change it or the many other discriminations his minority teammates face that he doesn’t.

On my mind is how when the trees turn from all brown to the first tinges of chartruse green anything is possible. How growing flowers makes you feel like you are doing a tiny bit to save the world, even if logically it makes no sense. How at this point I am actively doing less to save the world than I have at any other point in my life and how just for now I am not trying to change that. Wondering if that makes me apathetic, privilidged or just in need of a bit of rest.

Healing, hope & slowness

Well it has been a good long stretch of quiet here hasn’t it? I used to be a fast processor but not anymore. These days the thoughts ooze slowly through my soul, taking time to steep while I fold the daily load of laundry, drive car pool, read books aloud or teach fractions. Everything takes more time  than it used to.

A few months back I started swimming again, lap after lap after lap, to wash my swirling thoughts away. Kicking to try and find clarity. It started from sheer survival - our schedule this fall with Aaron traveling more than he ever has before was frankly a bit much. My own exercise (other than my daily dog walk) went to the wayside taking with it a good chunk of my unanxious mind. My parents came for a visit and could see I was hanging on by a thread, I think. My mom had a come to Jesus type talk with me about taking care of myself and based on her verbally brainstorming for me I finally figured out that I could swim a decent amount in under an hour - in and out. Several of my kids activities take place at our local rec center with a pool, if not there is one close to drop offs. So swimming it is for now. The blue of the pool and quiet of my head under the water brings me a much needed peace. You could say it is what is saving my life these days.

I still constantly find myself having feelings about how long healing takes. Here I am a year and a half after looking at myself, unrecognizable, everything I felt I was shattered into a million pieces on the ground. A year and a half is not a small measure of time, and maybe it isn’t a long one either but I certainly thought I would have ‘finished’ processing healing already. Back to my fast processing and high coping self, of course having learned all the lessons and experienced all the growth I needed to in order to be a more enlightened person. (I wish I were joking.)

A year ago I wrote that healing takes more time than people want to give you and now I year later I am writing that it takes more time than you want to give yourself.

I remember when my therapist chatted with me about sectioning off a period of time in which to focus on my healing and my family. A period of time in which I would say ‘no’ to anything else. I landed on six months. I thought I was being ridiculous and gracious to myself to set out that long period of time.

Now I sit here with open palms, no set end date because I am much more intimate with this process. Two steps forward and one and a half steps back. Reminding myself to keep clinging to God who works all things for good. If there is one lesson I don’t want to loose there it is.

Our culture tends to glorify ‘celebrity style overcoming’ and perhaps rightly so. When you are staring down a scary prognosis it is exceptionally encouraging to see people who have overcome ‘quickly’ with joy and enthusiasm. We want to believe we can self-help everything and to some extent we can. To some extent God gives us bodies and brains to help ourselves - sometimes a miracle looks like getting off our behinds and doing what God has made us capable to do. We can get our buts to therapy or yoga, we can seek out the wise treatments and therapies and modalities. But only by God’s grace does all the stuff work and we find ourselves on the other side - ‘healed’.

And then.

Then you still feel broken and lost and exhausted. Here comes the part of the story that doesn’t sell anything, so we don’t hear about it. This is where you find yourself siting in your ‘healed’ brokenness, feeling like you have messed up because this is supposed to be the easy part, the celebration.

This is the part where you get used to waiting. You get used to showing up and doing the right things to keep healing yourself even when it feels futile. Then you stop doing them and realize - nope not yet. I still need those things. At least for now but also, maybe forever. There are things you don’t get used to: feeling like a stranger in your own body, like a stranger in your own mind. You know there is more healing to come, you loose all pride you had about considering yourself low maintenance, resilient and being a high achiever.

You wish you could contentedly and serenely use prayer to let this draw you closer to God and wisdom and love (some days this happens). Instead, it is more likely you get irritated about life’s petty crap, about your unknowing what to do now, about how everything has changed and yet; nothing has.  You find yourself too agitated to make sense and plop things on a sticky note into your ‘God jar’. Not much here is pretty or presentable.

You listen. You listen a lot because you don’t have many coherent thoughts to share. You sit in silence. More silence than you ever imagined. You try to get comfortable with knowing you only know about two things for sure, while 1001 thoughts swirl around in you. You wait some more.

You move slow, slower, slowest. Sometimes you falter and shame yourself for your slow process but mostly you give yourself more grace than you ever have before. You rest more than before, because you still have to even 1.5 years later. At best this feels like progress (I’ve learned to rest!) at worse you feel like you will never be as healthy as you were.

And God. You still need to cling God. Because you aren’t as desperate as you were before, but you are other things instead. This was perhaps the most unexpected part. You are so grateful for your everyday ordinary life and also so many things are still being rooted out. You still feel sad, angry, frustrated, annoyed, tired and just done already alongside of grateful, grateful, grateful. More questions, more wresting, more learning. You are still in need of a savior and you are still in need of hope. Hope. The light. Rest from all the change and growing and learning. A glimpse of new life, an end (at least for now) of things dying away. You are aching for the bloom.

And then - and then it is advent.

Quiet. You find so much quiet and stillness. This is a natural posture for you now. Sitting, quiet. Being present. Palms open. Praying for eyes to see hope, hope everywhere. Perhaps more will die away but you are also open to receive. There is no magic. No single moment where you wake up and think ‘this is it I have bloomed’. Not yet anyway. Instead you listen for the next step, then the next, then the next. Slow, quiet, listen. Slow, quiet, listen.

This is the heartbeat of the healing.