humble beginnings | hopeful future
THAT I WOULD BE FREE
A few things I know.
Sometimes when I get quiet here it’s because I feel like I don’t know anything. Nothing. And that’s not completely true. So here’s a list of a few things I do know.
- I know if you are looking for sea glass on the beach, the best place to find it is in the patches of little pebbles.
- I know that butter and flour and baking powder and salt, mixed together and baked at 400 degrees for 10-15 minutes produces crispy, little pillows of heaven (aka biscuits).
- I know that as I get older, my body gets less forgiving and sometimes that means that little aches and pains will never be cured, they will only be managed.
- I know rainbow painted toenails will make approximately 60% of the general public smile.
- I know that lasting change comes from compassion.
- I know that compassion for others, only comes after compassion for self.
- I know despite everything, this hunk of flesh in my chest keeps moving and keeps showing me that it is amazingly capable of love.
Tis the Damn Season
Do I need to rethink my entire life?… Or is it just the holidays?
I found myself texting this to a friend who casually asked me how it was going?
Not good. Not good at all.
I mean, there are good things happening. But I think I wandered into the holidays a little off kilter. You see, I had the double whammy of Halloween and my son’s birthday this year. It’s something we probably didn’t think through very well when we set out the holiday schedule in our first parenting plan.
These two near holidays fall to the same parent each year and this year, felt like expectations were high. I think five-going-on-six, might be the year when kids become fully aware of and have full buy-in to such events. By this age they’ve got a little track record of their prior celebrations and other celebrations they’ve attended, so they now know enough to get whether they are at a fantastic or weak-ass celebration.
So the pressure was on.
I did the birthday party at the Air and Space Museum and invited his entire kindergarten class because we are new to these people and still making friends. It was a great success but way outside my comfort zone to invite 25 strangers and their parents to a museum to eat cake and open presents. I walked away feeling really thankful for the community we have with school. It was an enthusiastic, generous, beautiful group of people.
The week before that was Halloween. We did the regular thing of changing costumes last minute but luckily it was to the astronaut costume he wore last year. He wanted to be a fighter pilot originally and when we were looking at costumes, I asked if he thought I should be one too. He liked the idea back then (like late September!) but as Halloween grew closer, he grew out of that age where it’s cool to dress like your mom, so my Lucille-Buster Mother-Boy fantasy slipped away and not only was I not permitted to wear the fighter pilot costume, but he asked that I wear NO costume—just regular mom clothes.
I now see how this arrow found a weak chink in my armor of self confidence. I started to ask him if he was embarrassed about how I dress. I started to rethink my bohemian Free People clothes, not just for their over-pricedness and impracticality….but was I humiliating my son….who is in kindergarten!?!
It took me a couple of days to shake that off but eventually returned to my usual mantra of, Ain’t no man gonna tell me…not even the short one who lives in my house.
Then I made the theme park mistake.
For Veteran’s Day we were invited to go to Knott’s Berry Farm with some friends. To understand my tentativeness, you’ve gotta understand my theme park experience. I liked theme parks as a kid, but I was mostly terrified of the rides. I remember huddling on the floor of that giant rocking boat, The Tidal Wave, screaming in terror while my mom giggled and implored me that this WAS fun.
When I graduated high school, someone advised me to make a sort of bucket list of things to do before I graduated college. Roller coasters were on the list. I grew up in Wyoming so it wasn’t like theme park rides were plentiful, but I had never chanced a ride on a big roller coaster and I wanted to face my fear. I planned a trip to Elitch Gardens in Denver. I took ginger root to ward off any motion sickness. And I rode all the roller coasters. I even paid an extra $15 to ride the SkyCoaster, which was really just a harness attached to a cable, attached to a sky arch. I strapped in with two other people and the harness raised hundreds of feet in the air until the employees counted down and one of the guys I was strapped to pulled the rip cord. We plummeted in a free fall until the cables caught, swinging us gently back up toward the sky. I liked it! It was what it should be—exhiliterating.
After that I learned I liked rollercoasters! It was within the same stretch of a few years I found out I had these adrenaline-producing tumors in my abdomen. A while after they were removed, I remember visiting Lagoon in Utah on a slow night in the Fall. The park was empty and we ran from rollercoaster to rollercoaster and the adrenaline reminded me of how I used to feel somewhat regularly with all those little adrenaline-junkie tumors inside of me.
It was when I became a single mom that theme parks changed for me. Gosh—the dark Disney Land days of 2019! I bought a discount pass via the military because I was still not divorced. R and I would make the trip by ourselves, he would refuse to ride 99% of the rides, talk me into spending more money on overpriced toys in Cars Land and then fall asleep in the stroller, leaving me to drink alone in California Adventure, until he woke up and we could walk around for another hour before we got in the car to drive home. Those trips were a lot of work with a very minimal reward and they left me mostly feeling very alone. Dark, dark days indeed.
So in 2020, I declared NO THEME PARKS. Ummmm...I guess so did everyone else.
So by Fall 2021, I felt like I *should* (always a dangerous word) be ready for another theme park experience. And I wouldn’t be going alone. And I wasn’t driving up and back in the same day. So it *should* have been fine. But apparently everyone thought the same thing because Knott’s Berry was packed! Literally a two hour wait for lunch. If we’d have known, we would have walked out of the park and driven to a nice restaurant and then home! It was sort of a disaster.
So on the heels of that and in the midst of being a kindergarten parent for the first time, I find myself a little overwhelmed.
The sun is going down at 2:30pm when I walk out of work.
I find myself complaining about the cold when it’s 66* (but it’s humid! and there’s a breeze!—people in California are suffering!!!)
After a week-long hiatus from the mom gig, while R traveled with his dad, I thought I would be rested and ready for the business of Christmas. I planned to get a tree ASAP (terrorized by some goddammed article on Apple News that promised they would be scarce and expensive). I took R to Lowe’s (our traditional California Christmas tree lot, since the mountains of Wyoming are no longer accessible). We picked a good tree and got a few other home essentials followed by a full on Kris-Kringle-meltdown on the drive home because I said it was bedtime and we would have to decorate the tree tomorrow.
Rather than giving toys, I have been taking them away all week because it appears I have given birth to the mouthiest kid on the planet. I am tempted to tell him that I AM Santa just so I can garner some of the awe and fear I deserve! (Don’t worry, I’m not a monster…I won’t do that—but I’m not above shoving his precious toys in the top of the closet if it buys me a little r-e-s-p-e-c-t.)
I scheduled family photos this week because the week before Thanksgiving felt too busy (Note: This week was also too busy and there is not a good time to take family photos around the holidays). My friend Nick is an artist with a camera (and a wizard apparently!) because he got several great shots even though I was struggling to look easy-breezy while my kid and dog barely held still long enough for a 1/500 shutter speed in waning light at 4pm. God bless you, Nick.
I’ve been so out of sorts I took a pregnancy test this morning just to be sure that wasn’t it—it wasn’t. No announcements here! [Including this because it occurs to me that this is something men never have to worry about, holidays or not.]
I’m guessing you are picking up from my tone that I am sort of crash-landing into this first weekend of December, which prompted my initial question: Do I need to rethink my entire life?… Or is it just the holidays?
In the words of Eleanor Shellstrop: “I mean somebody royally forked up. Somebody forked up. Why can’t I say ‘fork’?”
On Friday I went to the gym today for the first time in two years. It felt kind of gross to me—you know, such a collection point for viruses after the pandemic changed everything. So I was reluctant. But I did back squats and box jumps and hip thrusters and I walked out of there feeling slightly better, which bloomed into decidedly better over the course of a few hours. I suspect because, I finally put the thing that my body and soul had been asking for, for months, at the top of the list—for just an hour.
I think the holidays are hard because we have the expectation that we can bumble into this darkest part of the year eating garbage food and giving up on the beach body of summer, substituting the religiosity of the holidays for any meaningful spiritual practice. Maybe the extra pounds become the padding we need as we attempt to embrace all the feelings of family and holidays, past, present and future, which, for many of us, are a mixture of beautiful and horrific.
We stay busy and satiated so we don’t have to feel because some of us are haunted by loneliness and loss. Some of us are compelled to see and talk to people who have inflicted some of our deepest wounds. For most of us, there is a sense of loss that comes with the rift between the life we thought we would have and the one we had to leave behind, or left us behind.
It feels incongruent with the tinsel T-rex sitting on my bookshelf, the happy-colored lights outside my house, even the nativity of Christ or the victory of the Maccabean army—because those are stories of hope—and sometimes hope feels dangerous.
Cheryl Strayed wrote, “Most things will be okay eventually, but not everything will be. Sometimes you'll put up a good fight and lose. Sometimes you'll hold on really hard and realize there is no choice but to let go. Acceptance is a small, quiet room.”
Sometimes the holidays feel like a small, quiet room to me, even as I go through the insane motions to make them noisy and crowded. Some of the bustle is just me trying not to notice the small, quiet room. The place where I have to sit with my idea of what I thought my life would be when I was a bright-eyed, silly, enthusiastic, hopeful little girl, and the reality of what it is today, which is actually something much more complex and rich and deep and interesting than what I could have imagined back then.
That’s hard. It’s forking hard.
So please, take care of yourself. Let the dark nights and cool whether, drive you to the small, quiet room.
Pain is on the other side of the door. But so is peace.
The Marco Polo Prayer
Sometimes I can’t feel god. I used to think this was because of something I had done. That god had withdrawn from me. I learned in church that god cannot dwell in unholy places so I assumed if I couldn’t feel god then something unholy was going on inside of me. I felt shame about this. I thought it meant something bad about me. But I was wrong.
I am not sure exactly when I figured this out. It was sometime after I had given up on doing everything correctly. After I had shed another cage. I observed that there were good people—people that I knew to be truly good at their essence—that didn’t keep all of the commandments, that didn’t worry about all the things. I wondered if they felt god. I believed they did. I wondered if we could really distance ourselves from god. And why would a god, who truly loved us, want distance from us?
This didn’t make sense.
I thought about the times when bad things happen to good people. Like when I was diagnosed with cancer at age 21. Like when my friend’s babysitter was picked up for a DUI with her kids in the car the night she left for a trip across the country. Like when my sister’s daughter had her first seizure the night she left on vacation. Like when my grandmother’s oldest son was born with a heart defect. Like when my friend’s daughter developed leukemia and was maimed by the treatment. Like when my other friend gave birth and then broke her leg four days later at the same time as her dog was dying of cancer. Where is god in all of this? Where are you, god!?!
“I’m right here. I’m right here.”
God is always here. Right here.
I learned this in the midst of my own suffering. Mark Nepo related his experience with terrible sickness from chemotherapy to Oprah on her Supersoul podcast. After a night of vomiting to the point of vomiting blood, Mark’s wife asked, “Where is god?” And Mark, in a moment of excoriated clarity, declared the knowing, “He’s right here.”
This idea of suffering and god has formed a new kind of prayer for me. I find myself, in moments where god feels particularly distant, asking, Are you there, god? Then I answer for god, I’m right here. It's like a game of Marco Polo, where I call out and god responds. And it always feels true. God is right here, in the happy, in the suffering, in the mundane. God is here inside of me.
God is in the peace AND in the suffering. God is both. God is all.
So if god is in all of it, all of the human experience, then surely it is sacred. Sometimes we get this confused in our minds. We think god will preserve the righteous. The scriptures are filled with this sentiment. Yet bad things continue to happen to people we know and love and people we’ve never met that we only hear about in tragedy via the news. That voice in my head that wants to distance me from god would say, If you would have done this differently then this might have gone differently, or If you were really listening to God you might have avoided tragedy. Or prayed harder or been kinder or read more scriptures or donated more money or whatever things are on the to-do list of the "righteous."
Cheryl Strayed wrote this in a life-changing (for me) installment of her advice column, Dear Sugar. It was in response to a letter writer who was struggling with her belief in god after her infant daughter developed a brain tumor that required invasive surgery. Please visit this link for the full piece, as it is beautiful:
“Countless people have been devastated for reasons that cannot be explained or justified in spiritual terms. To do as you are doing in asking if there were a God why would he let my little girl have to have possibly life threatening surgery?—understandable as that question is—creates a false hierarchy of the blessed and the damned. To use our individual good or bad luck as a litmus test to determine whether or not God exists constructs an illogical dichotomy that reduces our capacity for true compassion. It implies a pious quid pro quo that defies history, reality, ethics, and reason. It fails to acknowledge that the other half of rising—the very half that makes rising necessary—is having first been nailed to the cross.”
The very half that makes rising necessary—is first having been nailed to the cross. Maybe we are all to be nailed to the cross in this life. We are meant to be set ablaze. And even as this is happening we are meant to reach out to each other and up to god. Maybe god is the love the burns between us in such moments of vulnerability and pain. Maybe that is a close as we get to understanding god’s love for us. Maybe that’s when we touch it.
What if you allowed your God to exist in the simple words of compassion others offer to you? What if faith is the way it feels to lay your hand on your daughter’s sacred body? What if the greatest beauty of the day is the shaft of sunlight through your window? What if the worst thing happened and you rose anyway? What if you trusted in the human scale? What if you listened harder to the story of the man on the cross who found a way to endure his suffering than to the one about the impossible magic of the Messiah? Would you see the miracle in that?
What if god was here, right here, always?
Cover art for this piece: I saw this on display at The Broad museum in LA. It's by Edward Ruscha, The Right People and Those Other People, 2011.
There is beauty in the wobble.
Saul was one of the first patients in San Diego to scream at me. I remember the first time seeing him. I went into the field with my nurse to see patients in their homes. We came to his independent living facility (ILF), which was house in a poorer neighborhood in San Diego. I followed my nurse, Annie, into the house, into the kitchen, down the hallway. She was calling out the patient’s name. He appeared from one of the bedrooms. There were other residents of the house watching us, not bothered by what is a very routine intrusion.
My patient, I’ll call him Saul, was angry about not having Artane, one of his medications. He spoke quickly, his eyes pried wide open; he was visibly dirty, his hair short but pushed up in strange directions. He was wearing an oversized camo jacket, a t-shirt and cargo pants. The conversation about medication changed course erratically. I tried to introduce myself but he looked at me with disdain and rambled on. Soon he was mumbling out threats about bombs, becoming more animated and difficult to understand. I followed Annie’s lead as we walked out of the house and Saul followed us. We got back into her car and Saul stood by Annie’s window gesturing wildly, now screaming about Artane and bombs. She offered him a bottle of water through her cracked window but he refused. She pulled forward carefully and we left Saul there standing in the street shouting. This was one version of Saul.
There was another version that appeared months later. I drove to a different ILF to see Saul. By this time I had begun seeing patients on my own in their homes. Saul emerged from a quiet house where I was not invited in. We sat in some lawn chairs on the driveway. He was silent, eerily so. I asked him all of my usual questions about sleep and mood and appetite and medication. His gesticulated quiet, one-word responses. He was losing weight. He complained of being hungry frequently. Since he appeared to have stopped using meth, I wondered if he was on too much antipsychotic medication and being dulled by that. I offered to reduce his medication and he agreed to this. I suggested supplementing with food from food banks but he quietly and hopelessly said the others in the house would eat it.
There was another version of Saul that was in my office only a few weeks ago. His hair was dyed jet black. He was wearing an ill-fitting sport jacket and a button down shirt. He was happy and relatively at ease. We went through the regular questions. His thoughts were linear and easy to follow. He wasn’t what anyone would describe as “normal” but he was good. Saul looked good and he felt well. A few days later he was dead from methamphetamine overdose.
I have other stories about my psychiatric patients that sound more like successes. I like telling those stories better. But what I’m really learning to appreciate is the wobble. The wobble is the the fluctuation between the ups and the downs, the victories and defeats, the moments when I feel my capability and the ones when I feel my weakness. I used to spend so much time focusing on those high points that I forgot about the beauty of the lower half of the curve. And there is beauty there.
Maybe we miss it because the cycle happens too quickly. A couple of days ago I got an upsetting text from my ex-husband. I responded reasonably, initially, but then I devolved. I felt justified. I probably was. That night was a bit of a tailspin. I chose to numb out the fear and pain rather than let it pass through me. I went to sleep early.
The next morning I woke to my alarm at 7am. There were broken rain clouds visible through my bedroom window. I could see the wind was blowing so there was a thought that I should stay in bed—a compelling, logical thought. I had another thought too: “You have R this weekend so this is the last morning for the next four days when you have the luxury of being able to walk to a coffee shop and sit and write.” This was enough to get me out from beneath the covers and on my way.
The morning air was crisp and the big clouds were more majestic than threatening. The little neighborhood coffee shop was buzzing with caffeine and good mornings. I sat down with my laptop to write and I pulled out what I had been reading the night before:
“Only birth can conquer death—the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be—if we are to experience long survival—a continuous “recurrence of birth” (palengenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death. For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought: doom breaks from the shell of our very virtue. Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence is a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified—and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn.”
A Hero With A Thousand Faces, Joseph Campbell
I realized that I had been reborn in the morning. I shook off the night before and rose again. Maybe that is all we are asked to to. Rise again. Rise again. Rise again. The happy ending we dream of, we wait for, we anticipate with bated breath, maybe it’s just the transcendence of the rise. It’s the moment when I pop my head above the cloud cover and feel the warm sun on my face. Even as I know I will sink down under the gray layer again. It’s inevitable!
So the other night I was dismembered and the next morning I am reborn. The acceptance of this cycle/process feels free. It means that I don’t have to mire myself in shame, I can simply wake in the morning, wonder at my dismemberment for a moment, then shake it off and be born new. As I walked home from the coffee shop, I thought about the ways nature teaches this: the daily sunrise and sunset, the seasons, the lifecycles of plants, insects, animals. It’s like God was thinking, “I’ll just repeat this symbol absolutely everywhere I can so maybe they can get it.” There is beauty in the wobble. I see it, even in the life of my patient, Saul, who never freed himself from the numbing agents. I see it because I witnessed some of the occasions when he poked his head above the clouds and felt the sunshine on his face. And surly a God that teaches us to rise again in every iteration of nature, legend, scripture, folklore and fairytale, has made a way for us to rise again.
Just in case you ever feel ungrateful
I’m going to let you in on a little secret. I’m not thankful. At least, I’m not thankful for probably 95% of my day. I don’t walk around in a cloud of gratitude and satisfied bliss. For all my talk about mindfulness and the positive spin I work to put on my life, I spend a huge amount of time buried in unimportant details and worrying about the future or the past. I am often investing my thought energy in other people’s business (their thoughts, actions or feelings) or God’s business (things that are fully out of my control), instead of my own business. And none of this makes me feel very thankful.
Sometimes this fills me with incredible guilt. Moms of small children get this a lot from older women who say things like, “Just enjoy these moments because they go by so fast.” Now, not only am I suffering from the barrage of toddler emotions, but also the weight of guilt that I’m not enjoying his cute little hands placed on my face after he’s just handled a public toilet seat. Seriously people! That IS too much to ask.
I shared with my sister a couple of months ago that I made a short gratitude list in my journal. I felt particularly edgy because I only put on there what I was feeling gratitude for in THAT moment. When I told her this, she was unimpressed, “Yeah…so…what?”
Me: “I mean, I didn’t put all the stuff on there that I’m SUPPOSED to be thankful for!”
Sis: “Oh [pause] I guess I never think other people will read it so I don’t really worry about what's supposed to be on there.”
Of course, then she was the empathetic genius she normally is, and tried to make me feel LESS crazy for writing gratitude lists that no one will read but anyone COULD read because they are complete and thorough and no one is left off. Gratitude felt like a chore for a lot of years (not surprising given this little glimpse into my psyche!). It was something I was supposed to feel but was terrible at summoning, which only resulted in more shame and it’s impossible to feel gratitude when you’re in shame.
I think I’ve learned a little about gratitude this past year. I’ll try to shed some light here incase you are in the same boat as me.
First, stop living in the future. As someone who spent seven and a half years in college and grad school, and THEN put her then-husband through four years of grad school, I know a little about this. I spent a lot of years waiting for my life to start. I held on to the belief that something magical would happen when school was finished. And it would transform me from this limbo state into the rapture of fully formed adulthood. I’m guessing no one is surprised when I say—that didn’t happen. But putting that aside, I spent a lot of years waiting for the next thing, instead of living in the now. When I was always anticipating the next vacation or step in my education, it was impossible to feel much love for the present moment. The truth is, there are different phases in life and they each have things that are easier and harder. Things that I liked more and less. But anticipating the next phase never did anything but litter the current phase with discontent.
The second is to be kind to myself—to give myself what I need to truly feel cared for. Giving that responsibility to others is a quick path to resentment and discontent. Ignoring my own needs leaves me feeling depleted and it’s hard to feel thankful when I’m an empty vessel. So make yourself a sandwich, fit the workout in, go to bed early or stay up late, binge watch The Office, clean off your desk--then let go of the guilt for things that go undone while you do this.
The third is something I’ve been learning from my therapist. It relates to time. There are two types of time. Chronos is the time of the world. It’s the actual minutes and seconds until bedtime. It’s the hours spent crawling in traffic. It’s the two minute time out. It’s the time that passes slowly, that we feel.
Kairos is the time that we don’t feel. It’s the hour that goes by when I’m writing in the flow, where I suddenly remember to look at the clock and realize I’m going to be late for work. It’s the quiet moments floating on the rippling ocean surface watching for the next swell and taking in the sky and the sea. It’s catching up with a girlfriend over the phone. It’s late night pillow talk between lovers that leaves me floating and sleepy in the morning. It’s a long kiss on the lips from the 3-year-old love of my life.
Chronos is always ticking away, but Kairos only visits, often just for a moment. And Kairos is where real gratitude lives—sparkling, warm, immersive, flowing gratitude. The key is to catch it. To notice when I’m in it, or even after the fact, that I WAS in it.
Gratitude is a practice, which means it takes practice. I can’t beat it into myself with shame. I can only hope that as I gently nudge my brain back to the present, I will more readily notice all that I have and all that I am, for which I am thankful. Namaste.
Most humans are never fully present in the now, because unconsciously they believe that the next moment must be more important than this one. But then you miss your whole life, which is never not now. Eckhart Tolle