a stranger's touch

Most of the time I'm a pretty competent person. I manage a house and a job and three kids and a dog and two cats on my own. I've walked with countless clients through times of crisis, I've logged more hours on the phone with insurance companies than I care to count without killing anyone, and my kitchen, right now, is more or less clean. The InstantPot is on the counter slow-cooking stock from the chicken I roasted last night while Beatrice and a friend slumber in the family room in a pile of blankets and pillows upstairs. I mean, seriously. Sometimes I'm a fucking ace.

I do drop balls. All the time. Like the birthday party for a friend of Beatrice's that I clean forgot yesterday afternoon. I'm getting more used to it but honestly, I really hate when I screw things up like that, especially for the kids - things like missing an event because I didn't rearrange my work schedule in time, or the broken retainer the dog ate a week ago that I still haven't called the orthodontist about while Beatrice's teeth slowly shift back into mess. I definitely fret about them missing out because they only have one stretched-thin parent, about having to feel different because they're the kid whose mom didn't show.

In those moments of faltering competence when the balls are bouncing around my feet and rolling into the corners, I usually keep it together. Remember to breathe. Make a self-deprecating joke. Apologize. Act, more or less, like an adult. 

But the people in my life who know me best know that I also have a not-adult-at-all part of me who sometimes takes over in moments of exposed imperfection. She's pretty crazy. She cannot be reasoned with. She behaves like an overwhelmed toddler and I cannot remember life without her unwelcome visitations, so I imagine she is very, very young. 

I once described her appearances to my therapist like this: if I were waiting on a subway platform, most of my feelings would approach like the local train. Ah, here comes some grief. I do believe joy is approaching. I can be there to receive them. But when my freaky panicker bursts into my life, it's on the express. I can feel the wind and rush of her, the unstoppable nature of her insistence. For most of my life, when this happens, I feel helpless. All I can do is cry.

The environment that triggers her crazy more than any other is the sporting event. 

I experienced no early trauma in a baseball stadium. I was never yelled at by a shaming coach. Yet growing up, my lack of athleticism and paltry experience with sports always led me to panic when invited to play in a kickball game at a picnic, or when a gym teacher directed me to stand in front of a volleyball net. Didn't those people know I simply couldn't do any of this? That I would embarrass myself, let my teammates down, get very confused about which way to run? When someone throws a ball in my direction, my instinct has always been to duck. 

Somehow I made it through my eighties childhood, when one (especially a girl in underfunded public schools) wasn't always expected to be an athlete, without too much social stigma attached to me. And the older I got, the better I could keep my pathological fear of sports a secret. But the panic I felt when asked to play a friendly game of frisbee (no joke, panic) never really abated. 

As a parent, the lurking freak out beneath the surface has most often rippled into awareness at my children's sporting events. Even though I've been going to games and meets for years now, I still feel uncertain of myself in that role. Should I be yelling something from the sidelines like the other parents? Why don't I ever remember to bring a chair in my trunk? Was there a memo about the right kind of snacks to bring?

The last time it broke the surface was nearly a year ago, at the end of last summer, when I had to bring Gabriel for a sports physical at the high school in order for him to participate in cross country. I lost track of him in the crowd. Eventually, after long minutes searching, I found him sitting outside patiently, in the most obvious place that I hadn't looked simply because I didn't want to walk out there and be exposed as incompetent before all those other sporty-looking parents whom I didn't know (and some that I did) chatting happily with each other. The moment I saw him the express train barreled through me and I bit back tears, unable to even look at Gabriel as we walked to the car. He would know too. I was no good.

Because that's what that tiny toddler part of me believes: I'm not good enough. It is blatantly discernible when I screw up. Everyone I love will leave me; I cannot trick them any longer. They know. 

It sounds dramatic. It is. She's so little, she just doesn't understand. And so the feeling is huge. But I'm trying to learn to take care of her, rather than be mad at her. 

I hadn't heard from her since the sports physicals. But last Thursday, I arranged for Beatrice to be picked up by a friend from Girls on the Run and made sure Frances didn't need the car. I blocked the last half hour of the work day and rushed out so I could finally see Gabriel run in a track meet. I had missed every other meet, or arrived after his event, because it's been so busy at work and I can't seem to leave early enough. But this time I could, and I was determined.

I arrived at a sprawling complex of schools and athletic fields that was unfamiliar to me. All the parking lots seemed to be full, so I chose one, got out, and started walking in the direction other people were headed. I passed a lacrosse game, a baseball game, and began to feel confused. Was I at the right place? Where were all the runners? I called a mom friend whose kid is on the team, and then another, asking if they were here and could direct me. They are both amazingly competent and kind people so between their directions, I realized I was as far away as could be, on the opposite end of the complex from the big multi-team track meet. 

I checked the time. I was getting mad - local train mad - imagining I would miss him run again, despite my efforts. So I myself, in my work clothes and yellow platform sandals, broke into a run. 

And you know how when you run out of fear the fear gets bigger? Like that time in fifth grade when my best friend and I got convinced there was an evil ax murderer in my house when we were home alone, and started running in the dark streets back to her house, becoming more hysterical with every step?

Yep, that was me. I passed two fit moms out on a run and one called to me that she liked my running shoes. Surely this lighthearted comment was made in kindness. Ha ha! Yet I took it as if my yellow sandals were my own personal scarlet letter, and she a nasty puritan drawing attention to them. For shame! A mother who cannot find her son's track meet!!

When I finally made it, red-faced and sweating, I could feel my scared toddler inside beginning to rouse from her long nap. There were hundreds of parents and coaches and siblings and friends milling about, and multiple schools competing, so packs of teenagers in various team colors traveled the field and areas around it. I didn't see Gabriel at his school tent, nor on the field. Had I really missed it?

A kind, freckle-faced mom at the chain link fence surrounding the track saw me standing there, scanning all around, and offered to show me the schedule. He hadn't run yet. Exhale. I confessed I had just run across the entire complex because I had no idea where I was going. She smiled. I did that too, she said. 

Oh. 

I found a spot at the fence wedged between other spectators and took some deep breaths. I told the threatening-to-freak-out toddler in me it was okay. She curled back up in my heart, still watchful, in case things started to unravel again, but quiet. 

I watched the girls' relay and saw Gabriel and his teammates get ready for their relay. I waved, he waved back. I kept breathing. And then something happened that took me from fragile to healed.

Something grazed my hip. It was a little girl who was maybe three years old, standing close beside me. As I looked down, she threw her head back to look up at me. Our eyes met long enough for her to know that I wasn't her mother, and yet with our brown eyes locked like that, she smiled. I smiled back. And then she reached up - for a moment I thought she was asking to be picked up, but no - she stretched out her arms and placed her palms on my ribcage at the highest point she could reach. Along my thin blue sweater she slid her hands, down the length of my body, smiling even bigger without losing my gaze, delighted with her own audacity as she bent in half at the waist, pushing into her father's legs as he cheered on his older daughter. 

Someone called her, she turned and ran, yet I could still feel the pressure of her touch. It was a blessing.

I was good enough again. I knew it. I think my own inner little brown-eyed girl, seen and delighted, knew it too. 

After Gabriel and I got back from the meet I made lots more mistakes. When I went to pick up Beatrice, our friends who were hosting her handed me a glass of wine and invited me to sit on the porch in the twilight, where we watched her and her friends and other kids in their neighborhood play with a parachute in the street. The kids performed odd rituals they invented, lifting the parachute high and then sitting inside the crumpling dome of it, chanting strange sounds and laughing. Sitting on the porch, I forgot to pick up Gabriel's sandwich. I forgot Frances needed the car and she came looking for me, angry. I didn't mind. It was all repairable. 

I sat on a wicker chair beside a new friend, and my heart grew and grew in the peace of the night.

farewell time

Today we woke up in Buffalo with our friends, having drunk our fill of Niagara Falls over the weekend, and tonight we will sleep in our own beds back in Lancaster, having spent a good portion of the day driving through New York State and Central Pennsylvania. Some spirit of that beautiful country seemed captured in a tall billboard we spotted today that declared Every Day is Hump Day at the Adult Outlet, featuring a personable peach nestled up against a rather tall eggplant on one side, and on the other, Find out who Jesus REALLY is! with a phone number in bold below that read something like 1-800-I REPENT.

That, coupled with the gun outlets and flags, really brought out the snobbish asshole in me on the way there. I was joking around with the kids in an increasingly unhinged way every time we passed another XXX sign. But on the way home, I felt a lot milder about the whole thing. I mean, it's not my culture, not my language, but really, is it so very contradictory for lust and spiritual longing to be pressed up against each other like that? Can't crass sexuality and Jesus occupy two sides of the same sign? You might think they are there to cancel each other out, so to speak. But maybe they just bring out something potent in each other, by seeming but not actually being opposites. 

I missed church today, but I also felt a bit off the hook by the fact that we were traveling. I never know what to do with Easter. Ever since becoming a widow, I don't feel that comfortable with anything that's supposed to be all good, all triumphant. (And growing up UU and Jewish, Easter was never a big holiday for us; I only began to figure out my relationship to it as an adult.) I will always remember Mike positively glowing on the last Easter he was alive, so close to the pain of Good Friday and the miracle of resurrection, so delighted by the fact that He is risen! which he smilingly proclaimed only 10% ironically to me that morning on the sidewalk after church. The other 90% was pure faith and joy. He was alive, the sun was shining, he was well enough for church with his family, Jesus was risen. Sound the trumpets. 

I was genuinely happy to see him happy. I treasure the photos we took that day. But I wasn't singing out He is Risen! from the rooftops to anyone who would listen, because I wasn't feeling that way myself. I mean, is He really? Is anyone? Will they be? What if they just get cancer and die and leave you all alone? What if suffering is always here, even and especially contained within the joyful moments, and you can't ever blast it out with lilies and brass?

Like last week, I began the termination process in earnest with two of my treasured clients. 

One is a junior, and as long as all goes as planned we have another year together before graduation brings our work to an end. One is a senior, and though we haven't worked together for long, it has been very meaningful, and the fact that we have but a handful of sessions left before she launches out into the world struck her as terribly sad.

Termination is the weirdest, coldest clinical word. It simply means ending. Maybe we therapists use it because we need a little distance from the emotional reality of investing in work that calls on your whole self and that, if successful, ends. 

In an ideal world it happens when the client is truly ready, in their own time. The saying goodbye is bittersweet. Happy-sad. It represents the beauty of compassion born of suffering, growth, and a readiness to part with a source of support because it is no longer needed. But if the therapeutic experience really has facilitated all that healing, the relationship was central to it. It means the client felt deeply cared for. So the goodbye can't not hurt.

And the goodbye is harder when it's not time yet. In my work with college students, sometimes we have to end because it's time to graduate, but there is so much more we could do together.

But like being alive, like everything we do and every relationship we treasure, the fact that we are ending and our awareness of it makes the present moment together extra tender and deep. Deeper than it could ever be if our work were open-ended. Because of this, and so many other reasons that you likely share, spring is full of feeling for me.

Being brave enough to talk about it, to share the sadness, to say the words I'm afraid to end with you - this blows me away when it happens spontaneously in the chair opposite. This kind of vulnerability takes so much courage, it overflows one's heart. It's especially moving because I myself am often afraid to bring it up, and put it off longer than I should, knowing it will hurt to make it explicit. 

So my junior is someone I have worked with for years now, and who has taught me a lot about being brave. She has serious trauma in her past, and carries a lot of anxiety in her body as a result. When she admitted that she was afraid she might be making up her struggles, or that maybe she isn't really unwell, or maybe she doesn't deserve to be in counseling anymore, I just waited, listened. We listened together. It didn't take long for her to discover she was afraid I would leave. She was afraid this would end. 

So we talked about what it is like that her struggles are real, that she should be here with me, now, and to face our eventual ending, together. When she walked out of my office and I shut my door behind her, I lay down on the floor, closed my eyes, and hugged my knees to my chest.

Right now I am dating a man that I care deeply about. It's crazy how vulnerable it feels to care like this. Sometimes I feel so frightened that the door to my heart threatens to shut of its own accord. It's scary for a lot of reasons, but one of them is that somehow or other this relationship too will end. Sometimes I can feel the ending pulsing within its beginning. The two are so intertwined, they can't be opposites. They are two threads of connection: openness to a deepening future, and grief that the openness cannot go on forever.  

I think the mystery of resurrection has something to teach me, if only I could be brave enough to receive it. Something about a tenderness that transcends the tenderness of endings and permits fear to slide from its fingers, no longer needed. That beaming joy Mike embodied five years ago wasn't premised on a forced forgetting of his own suffering; he never turned away from hard truths. He knew this would all end far too soon, yet on that spring morning, for a moment, he opened his heart wider still. 

Maybe next Easter I won't spend seven hours in the car. Maybe I'll go to church, and like my client, I'll find the courage to tell God the truth about how afraid I am, how Easter makes me want to brace myself for all the endings.

I'll be scared, and I'll try to listen.

graduation

Tuesday was Beatrice's ninth birthday. 

The year she turned five, March 1st began very early. Not that night and day were meaningful categories in the hospital. But it was still dark when I accompanied Mike from his room on the eighth floor downstairs to surgery to repair the ruptured feeding tube apparatus inside of him that was causing acute pain with every tracheostomy-facilitated cough. And the coughing was constant. Everything hurt then, for him and for me, though nothing more in that moment than the awareness that I was missing Beatrice's fifth birthday because of all this. This torrent of disease, pain, medical system failure, constant uncertainty. The torrent took everything away with it. 

My sister was in town and she and my mom helped make Beatrice's party happen. It was at a trampoline park. They sent me pictures while I sat anxiously in the waiting area. Life kept happening, even the lives of our children, and we were missing it.

This year I planned Beatrice's party at a little bowling alley/arcade in town. It was last Sunday. I met some of her school friends for the first time and admired their flashing smiles, buoyant energy, nine year old naughtiness, long limbs, deep down sweetness. Three parents spontaneously decided to stay with me during the party, and later my mom joined too, everyone shrugging off the fact that staying was a kindness, knowing I would likely get overwhelmed by the responsibility of all those children running wild in an open space filled with so much fun. I felt quietly cared for by their presence, and watched Beatrice glowing, dancing with triumph with her friends as their bowling balls bounced like enormous slow motion pinballs, back and forth off the bumpers, eventually making contact with a handful of pins. 

Yes!!!

I thought to myself: maybe I've outgrown the grief that has accompanied her birthday over the past three years. Maybe I can finally experience this simply as a special day for Beatrice, unsullied by the trauma of Mike's final harrowing days on earth. Wouldn't that be great?

On Monday night while Beatrice was at dance class I was feeling overly sensitive to various unimportant domestic irritants and my own parenting shortfalls and so announced I was running out to get some final bits to gussy up the birthday. In the car, alone (finally), pulling out onto Walnut Street, I felt a geyser of pain rise up within me, completely shocking in the suddenness of its presence. I cried and cried. Moaned and sobbed is more like it. Vocalized something dark and sharp while hot tears fell onto my lap in the driver's seat. 

Wegman's is about a six minutes' drive from my house, and by the time I pulled into the parking lot the geyser was spent. Only the shuddering aftershocks remained, and those soon passed too. She was so little. That was the thought that started and ended it: she was so little. 

How could Beatrice's little body have received all that pain around her? Where did it go? Is it stored still in her lengthening bones, her soft warm skin? 

Lately I myself feel like a human lightning rod. I receive the hot energy of other people's feelings; they pass through the safety of my body on their way into the earth. I sit cross-legged and tall in my soft burgundy chair at work all day and invite, welcome, receive the crackling emotional energy of my clients. Then I walk home and do my best to be present to the changeable kitchen weather that three children generate. I remind myself to breathe. I conduct lightning. It's a lot, but I can do it.

The difference for me is that now I really can conduct emotions; they move through me and I am unharmed. Tired, sure. Sometimes I need to retreat to my bedroom with a book. And when I can't take a lunchtime walk to shake out the morning sessions' emotions that didn't quite make it into the soil I'm bummed. 

But the essential experience has changed because my own feelings now also fill my body, and I try to listen to what they tell me. I am learning through faltering, earnest practice to permit them to come and to go, to hold them compassionately while they are here; because of this I can ground other people's energy in a sustainable way. In those crisis cancer days and the months that followed Mike's death everyone else's feelings swirled in a scorched field inside me. By the time he died I was burned to nothing. When someone asked me how I was during those years, I went blank. How was I? I wasn't. Nothing could grow. The pain of my husband and my children and to a lesser extent the circles of caring family and friends around us seared every available space to ash. I didn't believe my own pain to be relevant. 

But being human is an exquisite, surprising thing, and so much has been sprouting in my ash-enriched insides. My own therapy, work with my clients (in which recent trainings have empowered me to be more deeply compassionate and present), my immersive experience at the mindfulness retreat, meditation, reading, yoga, dance, all of it has been teaching me to cherish this imperfect body, this vast inner space, this spirit. In stolen quiet moments I sometimes rest my hands on my body with all the tenderness motherhood has taught me. 

There is more room here than I ever knew. 

My clients who are preparing to graduate are taking stock of the past four years, realizing how much they have grown, mustering up the courage for their next uncertain steps. They are entering a time of transition and new possibility. On March 12th it will be four years since we lost Mike, four years since I held his hand. To be without him, to know what we all endured, to witness the pain of my children - it hurts so much, just as much as it ever did. It is my relationship to the pain that is shifting. 

I look back on the past four years, and I am proud of how much we have all grown. I know now my pain is relevant; I know how precious I am to me. I am ready for the next unknowable chapter. 

 

now and then

Lately my inner and outer life have been encountering one another with a particular curiosity and fizz, which every so often results in an alchemical story-busting magic. Like an onion that you had no idea held layers beneath its taut brown skin peeled back and then peeled back again. I have held old stories tight to my chest about what my life and I am supposed to be like - tight as the layers of an onion pressed against one another. I have held them so close I didn't know they were there. 

When circumstances conspire to allow me to hold an old story out away from my body so I can see it properly and recognize the thin places where it isn't really true, I feel exhilarated. And scared and sad. Stories about what I am supposed to perform for others, how I am supposed to look, what I can control, what I should accomplish and desire, what I should be able to contain and manage when it surges inside me. 

I found myself unexpectedly crying the other day in the middle of telling someone how amazing it is that we can keep growing and becoming more truly ourselves as time passes, despite our culture's suggestion that aging is a one-way trip to something smaller, lesser than what we once were. I am thrilled that I get to set down old stories that are no longer and maybe never were true and consider new ones that reveal something closer to what really is. 

The tears were for Mike, who never got to experience this distinct stage of life, one defined less by striving and articulating one's path and more by consolidation of and learning from all those grasping years before. 

I was forty when Mike died. I felt crushed by the almost immediate awareness that an essential part of me died with him. I mourned for my children who lost both their father and the mother they used to have, someone happily partnered and far more resilient and cheerful and competent than the raw grieving wreck I knew myself to be. 

They really did lose the old me. She is never coming back. The strange thing is that now, nearly four years later, I don't want her to.

I like my forties. I like how I make decisions and communicate and reflect on what I want. I like swearing freely and learning to ask for help and my fledgling efforts at growing spiritually. Even more surprising, I like the family we have become, the relationships we push and pull and play inside of as everyone keeps growing in his or her unique, relentless, stunning fashion. 

But so much of who we have become finds its roots in Mike's cancer and death. It freed us to be more honest, loving, angry, mindful of things other people often aren't. We like that. Which is, to say the least, confusing. 

It is profoundly sad to feel your strengths, the things you like about yourself, inextricably tied to your deepest loss. I long for sturdier bridges to connect the before times to the abundant present. I would like my children to know that all of this links to all of that, even if our world hadn't ruptured in between.

Last night at bedtime I told Beatrice how proud her papa would be - is - of her. 

Why? 

It's just the way you are, Beatrice. The way you think and move and make jokes and sleep and snuggle. Just being who you are is being someone your papa is proud of and loves so much.

Oh. 

And that brought forth a wave of anguish, a deep grief over her rapidly fading and lost memories. She feels left out. She wishes she had had more time. So we took out the book of photos I made for her birthday last year and told stories about all the images of Beatrice and Papa, all the moments captured that prove they were together and loved each other well. 

She feels guilty for not feeling sadder. She always tells me this with her eyes filled with tears. She feels guilty for liking our family the way it is, and not knowing what it was like before Papa got sick and died. If he walked in the front door right now, would he be a stranger to her?

No he wouldn't, I said. It might take you a few minutes. But you would know Papa, and he would know you. That never changes.

We cried for a long time, for how awful it is that he never met Ramona the dog, or our funny cats, or lived in this house, or knew about Beatrice's third grade teacher - so much of what structures everyday life. It's terrifying to think the gulf between us widens as we all grow. In one way, I know it never really does. But still I feel frightened. I can't lose him over and over. 

Many years ago, when our friend Edith asked Mike how he knew he was ready to marry me even though there was no way to know how I would change and he would change and what would happen for the rest of our lives, he said he felt confident that he would love whoever I became. However much changed, at the root of it, he had faith that I would still be me, a person he deeply loved. 

That can be true in the other direction too, even though it didn't occur to me then. However much I change, my love is unaltered. Maybe that slippery abstract truth is one of the bridges I long for. Maybe it can support all of us as I keep learning new stories and tentatively stepping into the truth they offer. 

Even so, I wish he'd met Ramona.