“The big thing is so ridiculous that you absorb only the smaller miracles.” –Kevin Wilson, Nothing to See Here
On Sunday morning I was drinking my coffee when I received an email about Little Brother’s soccer team: they would be having their first practice the next day.
This is the soccer team that was formed nearly three months ago and whose original first practice had been called off, like so many things, due to the pandemic. I had been given second-hand uniforms from a friend but still lacked cleats and shinguards and whatever else you need to play soccer that I don’t know about because if it didn’t involve a book and solitude, then I didn’t grow up doing it, and the whole idea of this Big New Thing left me reeling. I’m not ready, I thought. I’m not ready for the real world yet.
I went outside to do some yoga a few minutes later, to relax and get away from all the people in my house, but the wind was whipping my mat around and I grew angrier by the second. I don’t think an ideal yoga practice is punctuated with obscenities, but there I was trying to relax, dammit while cursing the weather and the world.
Last week, when school was just occurring one day a week and I had opted out of the online homeschooling component and social interactions hadn’t graduated several levels, a friend and I talked about how maybe things were at the perfect point: there weren’t many obligations we had to meet or people we had to see. We had reached Optimal Pandemic Response Level and maybe could stay there awhile? But now the kids are back full-time and things are opening back up (slowly, here; what are all those assholes doing on the beaches in America?! GOOD LUCK WITH THAT) and the restart, this reintroduction into society, is making me pine a bit for our former seclusion. It’s also, apparently, making me angry.
Here’s the thing: when I’m carrying around irrational yoga-mat or otherwise-directed anger, I know it’s due to one or both of two things: anxiety and/or unprocessed grief. This is the kind of wisdom that therapy provides. I used to walk around the world bruised and mad and not knowing why. Now, when I scream “F— you!” at the wind, I think of what my counsellor would say: that anger happens when we haven’t properly grieved. Or what he did say, in our most recent session: that maybe the panic attacks and other anxiety have come up because that anxiety has always been there, latent, and this quarantine gave it space to rise to my awareness.
This makes me wonder what else is hiding in there, waiting to come up.
But I already know, really, and it’s new versions of the same thing. It’s the same sadness over the space between what the world is and what it should be; over the disappointments that arise when expectations are not met. It’s the anxiety of watching my children navigate this world and wanting to protect them through it in a way that would be unhealthy and suffocating for all of us. It’s living in this world, period, as myself, and dealing honestly with all that’s not perfect instead of distracting myself from it. And it’s doing that over and over again, like some kind of idiot, which is to say…surviving.
I went to the mall yesterday, nervously and begrudgingly (always), and picked up a book about raising kids with special needs. I wondered what advice I might glean from scanning and not buying it, and as I flipped through the pages, I realised it was a “how to” narrative that I have already “done” most of on my own. Battling loneliness, managing advocacy, facing denial–I’ve been there, and I will be there again, but I’m not where I was. Same thing, different view.
Then I drove to our new neighbourhood, where we’ll be unpacking in two weeks, and to a lookout near that house where we’ve spotted rainbows before. And then (because the kids were still at school!) I drove to our current nearby beach and walked it and looked at the same water I had just seen from a different vantage point. I thought about how it feels like this, how we’re always starting over at the same things. About what Michael Jordan had said on the last episode of The Last Dance, describing the beginning of his career with the Bulls: “Started with hope…started with hope.”
How, even with the grief and anxiety–no, because of it, because living deeply acquaints us even more with it–so within the grief and anxiety, at the start of every new thing, lies hope, which is really just grace born anew, over and over.