The other morning I finished a run in the usual spot, an off-leash dog park near our house. I was waiting for The Husband and the boys to show up with Kevin the Dog, and while I waited I was treated to an appearance from the local pug and her owner. We started talking, and he told me about a friend of his who has been taking their dog to a dog therapist. I’m all for therapy, but this just sounds like flushing money down the toilet, right?
Or…it’s the most brilliant subterfuge ever! The pug’s owner went on to say that it sounded, from his friend’s description, that the therapist was dealing more with the issues of the dog’s owner than those of the dog itself. Immediately, I began thinking of all the people I could refer to “dog” therapy.
The Kid is, as they say here, “going well” with his own psychologist, and I realize that I’m benefitting by proxy. Last session, we worked through some strategies for settling ourselves, and she emailed a book that I read through with TK and Little Brother. Strategies meant to ground us in our bodies in the present moment, and I’ll be damned if I haven’t been giving them a test run.
The first was to look around at your surroundings and locate two blue things in your line of vision. The second, close your eyes and identify two sounds. The third, take two deep belly breaths.
We’ve been trying these with TK to varying degrees of success, and I’ve found the same success rate with myself, but…it’s something! It’s something to be both grounded in what my body is experiencing, and at the same time to observe my body’s experiences. To be within and without, together and separate. This is the groundwork of meditation, and it’s also been the mechanism of action of Lexapro, and I find prayer does that trick as well. In fact, it seems to me that sanity itself involves some balance of these apparent extremes–of many extremes, actually. My sanity, at least.
I’m beginning to understand that I don’t live life so much in the middle as a function of being even-keeled and…well, just being balanced already, but as an alchemy of various extremes: depression and euphoria, anxiety and calm, fire and ice, what have you. “Happiest and saddest, inside and out,” writes Miranda Cowley Heller in The Paper Palace, and don’t I know it.
The feelings book sent by “our” therapist made the point in kid-friendly language: that it’s hard to be angry and curious at the same time, or mad and able to laugh. The boys and I agreed, because it’s true: how many times in my life have I been so committed to one extreme that I lost the ability to be curious, to explore other ideas, to ask questions, to not take myself too seriously? These days, I think, I spend more time vacillating, travelling–recognising that I’m on one extreme before seeking to balance it with the other. Maybe this is some form of health, or at least adventure: wandering purposefully from one side of the see-saw to the other instead of sitting all balanced and pristine in the middle of it.
It makes for stories, to be sure. And apologies. And forgiveness.
And so it is with children who have been in lockdown, from LB who travels from tears one second to proclamations of love the next; from TK who–when we’re at the beach one cool and cloudy morning that doesn’t make for warm swims yet somehow, in its extremes, leads to the best wave-riding I’ve done in awhile–complains grievously about the toddler who’s interrupted to “help” build his sand castle; a few minutes later, I see TK reach out and give the boy a pat on the belly and a big grin. And his mother and I start talking, and I tell her about my boys, and TK tells her he has autism, and within minutes we are telling each other our stories. The day has gone from sun to clouds, calm to wind, in a matter of minutes, and we have travelled within it, and sometimes these unlikely ones are the best beach days. Then we say goodbye, and as we walk to the car I notice my two blue things: ocean and sky, always there.