My swim this morning sucked.
It was just after sunrise on a day that had been predicted to be rainy. Instead, the glowing orb’s rays bounced off the water and shimmered on top of it and altogether blinded me on my laps headed south, as it blasted my view to the east. Too much sun was my problem.
Also, my goggles leaked. And my ear plugs wobbled. And the water’s visibility was terrible because we’re approaching summer and boats are stirring up sand. But mostly, it was the sun.
Is this what five years of living on some of the most beautiful beaches in the world gets you: an assumption that every swim will go smoothly? Views that you begin to pass by on your morning run or drive without even seeing? All the things that enamoured you upon your arrival now becoming just white noise in the background of your life?
It’s been a hard week. LB has loved plunging back into school, but he’s tired–and TK and I, we’re anxious. Anxious about the dropoffs and pickups that are back to being part of our days and the elements of traffic and timeliness and social interaction they reintroduce (and that we’re rusty on). Anxious about his own return to school next week and the mixed feelings it will bring, the adjustments it will require. For his part (and mine, and Kevin the Dog’s), he’s missed his brother and playmate.
All of this has led to a week of Big Feelings, culminating yesterday in an Epic Tennis Lesson that ended up being more about emotional regulation than hitting shots. We were all ragged and weepy at the end, and I had my usual “I’m not cut out for this” doubts about my own parenting, about my own choices in life that led me here and not to some solitary existence on an Italian shore, writing from an apartment overlooking the sea. In my best moments, I come through for my kids with all I’ve learned from therapy and personal growth and meditation; in my worst, I resent all they demand of me that I struggle to give and that doesn’t involve handing them an iPad to numb their–and my–feelings.
We’ve had breakdowns. Meltdowns. Undoings. Rage-filled screams and apologies and all the emotional rollercoasters over everything from the existential pain of being fundamentally misunderstood, to being told we’re going to the beach after school (I wish I had a photo of LB sobbing at the school gate after TK delivered that devastating news. #privilegedAF). Which means that after I read this quote from Alain de Botton, I felt seen:
“A breakdown is not merely a random piece of madness or malfunction; it is a very real–albeit very inarticulate–bid for health and self-knowledge. It is an attempt by one part of our mind to force the other into a process of growth, self-understanding and self-development that it has hitherto refused to undertake. If we can put it paradoxically, it is an attempt to jump-start a process of getting well–properly well–through a stage of falling very ill…In the midst of a breakdown, we often wonder whether we have gone mad. We have not. We’re behaving oddly, no doubt, but beneath the agitation we are on a hidden yet logical search for health. We haven’t become ill; we were ill already. Our crisis, if we can get through it, is an attempt to dislodge us from a toxic status quo and constitutes an insistent call to rebuild our lives on a more authentic and sincere basis.”
Let’s give it up for breakdowns, for without them (according to de Botton, and me, now) we’d be gliding along to the white noise without even living.
I’ve found this to be undeniably true. So often, I have to be shaken awake from the safety I’ve constructed around myself. I have to be decimated to be rebuilt into something new, something better. I have to be moved from where I was to where I’m meant to be. I would almost never make these choices myself; life (grace) makes them for me. And I hate them, until I don’t.
I stopped my laps early this morning because it was just too hard, all the sun and water in the spots I didn’t want them to be, and instead of continuing, I stayed. I stayed in one spot and treaded water there, floating where I was, turned toward the beach. In The Turn of the Screw, Henry James writes in the voice of the governess narrator regarding her charges–the children she now loves–“Instead of growing used to them…I made constant fresh discoveries.”
It’s so much easier to get used to things/people, then demand they stay that way. So as not to upset the status quo. Then you’re stopped, or moved, or decimated, and you look around and finally, again and maybe anew, see. I floated in the water this morning, finally and forcibly disconnected from my goal, my plan, and felt the blasting sun at my back. William Blake’s words rang in my heart:
Look on the rising sun: there God does live…
And we are put on earth a little space,
That we may learn to bear the beams of love
There in the water that assaulted and held me, I turned toward the sun.