I should know, after all these years inside my own mind. I should know that a week of rose-smelling and gratitude moments and cozy joy would be followed by this week. This week of anger, of ruing my own station in life, of walking across the Harbour Bridge and wondering what a fall from that height would feel like.
Do not be alarmed: these are just the ramblings of a mind that deals in extremes (in case you’re new here or just prone to panicking. What’s that like?). My highs are high and my lows are low, and Lexapro helps even them out but that still only gets them within several standard deviations of normal (a word I’m growing convinced does not need to exist due to lack of evidence).
Last week, I dropped the boys off at the gate one morning and stayed, as I always do, to creepily watch them through the trees. They ran off to their classes, as they always do, then ran back out and met in the middle of the playground: The Kid in his baseball cap with the neck-protecting fabric panel, Little Brother with his flouncy cap because he lost the baseball cap earlier this year and I Just Can’t Even. I watched as they cased the joint, walking around and looking for their friends and talking, and the sight of the two of them together like that–brothers on an ordinary day, sharing life–washed over me in a flood of joy. I remembered when they were babies, I imagined them as adults, I thought about how lucky (#blessed) they are to have each other and we, them. And I floated away.
Later that week, LB grabbed a blanket, sat on the couch, and requested for us all to join him. And we did, for a solid five minutes–a bit of a record considering there are two anxious types among us–and even the dog joined on the floor beneath us, and as I felt their warmth around me and the safe harbour that is our family, I felt overcome again with joy.
Then this week happened.
I’m thinking about looking into my diet, and hormones, but really? I think this is just me. Forty-three years and therapy tell me so. I feel all the things, deeply, and this can seem like a curse which, when grace is involved, turns into the same thing as a blessing. Cut to me gritting my teeth through parenting and coming off the Harbour Bridge by foot…barely.
But then, cut back to spending an hour of Election Day on the beach, walking and swimming in the sun. To chance encounters with like-minded friends on the path outside school and the ensuing laughs. To finally getting this in the mail the day before the election because coincidences are God’s way of remaining anonymous. To, in a year nearly devoid of celebrations, a weekend with three of them for Halloween (even though LB hijacked one of them into a birthday celebration for himself).
I ride all of these like the waves they are to my super-sensitive heart, which often leaves me more windblown and exhausted than the next guy. But would I trade it?
There are people who can’t even cry over shit that deserves to be cried over because of their distance from their own feelings. As I put it to a friend–so profoundly I thought (joke’s on her; I stole it from my therapist)–I really that believe that most people’s inability to grieve well causes so many of society’s problems. People aren’t comfortable in that uncertain space, that tension between knowing and not knowing, that proximity to depth of emotion that renders us fully aware of our lack of control. I’m trying to teach the kids, and myself, that this is where life and grace show up the most.
That hiding your emotion doesn’t make you more brave, but less human. And also, less protected. And more vulnerable. Which makes me hope, and believe, that someone beyond me is keeping us all safe.
So I’m writing this on Election Day, before we know what’s going to happen, from that tension blown up a thousand times and turned up a hundred degrees. I write it from my children’s childhoods, before we know “how they’re going to turn out” and “if they end up happy” and what all that will look like. I write it from the month before Christmas, when we’re looking for someone to show up and save us from this mess and that someone shows up as a crying baby?!
Whether you believe that last part or not, you have to admit it would make a pretty good twist. And I’m all about twist endings that actually turn out to be beginnings.