My skin is tingling and my joints are aching from the first dose of Astra Zeneca vaccine I received yesterday. I’ve been supervising year four writing assignments and year one maths, my head on a swivel like I’m a spectator at Wimbledon and anxiety ping-ponging around my chest until I walk away to breathe. I haven’t seen my extended family since Christmas 2019 and I don’t know when I will again. In a couple of days, The Kid has his first session with a clinical psychologist who specialises in autistic children. I miss cities.
I’m thankful.
I try to remember that when it all becomes too much (so…every five minutes or so), when the overwhelm nearly drowns me and my mind considers the possibility that nothing will ever be the same again.
I’ve faced “nothing will ever be the same again.” And I’ve learned that it can be more painful and piercingly beautiful than anything that came before it.
I’m considering the idea that this worldwide pandemic that has led to so much separation and sickness can also be the source of some healing. That we’ve had two significant stints of lockdown now to show us how we were ill before, what we were doing wrong and how we can live differently afterward. And I’m not just talking about washing hands.
In the relative (not to be found online) quiet, truths rise to the surface. Truths about our unwillingness to consider the collective over our own convenience. Truths about the ways we fail to love each other. Truths about the ways we rely on our own comfort and control rather than putting faith in those who know more than we do.
I’m angry, and I’m okay with that, because when it feels like the world is on fire it’s only fair to look around and wonder who lit the match. I’m tired of reading opinion pieces (from pastors, no less) that both-sides an issue that I happen to think has a right and wrong take. I can love you (or rather, I can rely on a supernatural source for that love) without respecting your idea that the government is trying to kill you (pretty narcissistic, btw) or that vaccines cause autism (ableist much? Also, you should be so lucky as to have discovered a shot that gives you a kid like mine).
I miss walking down West 11th Street in New York City. I want to take the kids to the Tower of London (we love creepy). I wonder when I’ll get to sit in my sister’s kitchen with a glass of champagne and laugh with our cousins until we cry.
At the same time, I’m reading and hearing things I never would have read or heard had life gone on like before. I’m going down pathways of neurological health and dismantling the patriarchy and fighting racism and the toxic reach of evangelicalism, and I feel passion for every little thing I am doing (except my kids’ zoom meetings. Those are getting old).
I’m being pulled in new directions, and stretching is painful. It involves the loss of comfort, of what came before so that it gives way to something new. I am counting on something new.
This morning, TK turned to Little Brother and asked him if he wanted to come with us on Friday to see the therapist. Like it was an invitation to a long-awaited holiday. And when I described it to LB the way I had to TK, his eyes lit up. ‘Yeah, that sounds good,” he said.
It’s the broken who find healing. It’s those of us who feel cracked inside who feel so much of life, deeply. “If you have not learned to lament, you have not learned to love,” writes Jemar Tisby. On our way home from a walk last week, I heard the strums of a guitar and saw our across-the-street neighbour sitting on his front stoop, playing. I lifted a hand to wave at him as he did the same. I miss live music, I thought, and ached, and considered how much more beautiful it is now than it ever was.