We are back to regularly scheduled life, for the most part, and as with most things this is wonderful and hard and everything in between. Reentry paired with warmer weather and longer days? Wonderful. Reentry paired with anxiety and hyper-vigilance? Hard.
We’ve talked about it, the boys and I, about how this is a process and will take adjustments. How we need to be patient with ourselves and the world, that there will be hiccups along the way. And how. A few nights into his return to school, Little Brother woke me up with the coughs of a forty-year pack-a-day smoker. The next day, he and I received a couples Covid test (negative, tks) and he proceeded to bounce off the walls all day and ask what we were going to do next (the answer: watch me fold laundry).
The Kid’s adjustments, like mine, have veered more toward the internal: anxiety (forever and ever amen) and our manifestations of it. My body likes to awaken me sometime in the hour prior to 5 am, then assault me with everything happening in the next week or two until I finally give up on going back to sleep. TK has been struggling with feeling overwhelmed too, which he expresses through outbursts of frustration, loud and emotional. It’s been…a lot.
He had one at the beach last week, at the spot we haven’t visited since before the lockdown, where we met friends after school. Something happened that made him feel slighted, and he lost it. Luckily, we were among people who know us and are in too deep to bail now, so we all rode it out together and soon exited the storm and hit smooth skies. He had, as I’ve told him, endured one of his triggers (feeling unseen)–even during his outburst, he said it: “This is one of my triggers!”
Then we endured one of mine. Champagne glass in hand, heart aching. I watched as the kids all played together, and TK occasionally joined in, and some of the others also popped in and out of the group. But I watched his differences play out socially in a way I hadn’t really in some time, and it hit me afresh–in a triggering way, if you will–how he often struggles to be seen and heard and understood; how friendships that were easy when they were younger have taken different shapes since then and often pass him by or leave him out, without malice from anyone, just because that’s how things sometimes go. And it hurt.
Seeing these truths with open eyes, it pierces us. It reveals our wounds, our vulnerabilities. Our triggers. But I wouldn’t have made it this far (which is to say, alive, and hopeful) if I didn’t believe that these are the exact places where we will also be healed. Where new life will be found.
Because not seeing? Not seeing TK, or others like him, or our own flaws and wounds….this is where I’ve been before, and where I’ve been taken from to be where I am now. It has been brutal, and harrowing, and hard and wonderful. I’m learning that a willingness to be disrupted is essential for a journey through grace. And wouldn’t you know that being disrupted is one of my triggers?
I’m beginning to think it’s also one of my saviours.