The Boy got his first acceptance to college yesterday.
OMG what a miracle.
If you had asked me in the spring of 2019 where I saw myself in a year and a half, it would not have been getting a text from my son in Montana saying "Give me a call. Good news."
I knew what the text meant when I saw it. The first school he applied to has rolling admissions and he was waiting. We knew the envelope--thick or thin--would in the mail arrive this week. When I saw the message, I didn't respond for a minute or two. I was just grateful and happy--happy for him, happy for me. Some kids get into college easily. Some fret that their 3.98 GPA isn't good enough for whatever top school they want. Here is my son who laid in bed for six months, not doing anything, finally wanting to go to college. Not just wanting--actually doing the required work to qualify and apply.
And so it goes. My friend Anderson said it was due to all of the hard work, energy and money everyone had put in--me, the Boy, Jack--to get the Boy on a path to recovery. Still, I give the Boy a majority of the credit. To Anderson's point, Jack and I worked hard to give the Boy an environment in which to heal, but he needed to do the work to get better, to take ownership of his life. And he did.
Today, I am going to bask in gratitude. This is a major milestone, an epic accomplishment.
Last night before I went to bed, I re-watched the Pacific Northwest Ballet's Rep 2 online. When I woke up this morning (at 4:00 a.m. because I couldn't sleep), I thought about one of the dances, Ghost Variation. It is a new work, choreographed during the pandemic. The nineteen century composer wrote the piece of music before he died, believing that other deceased composers were speaking to him from their graves. This morning I thought about a few of my own ghosts who not nearly so charming or inspirational. Maybe they weren't exactly ghosts, but they haunted me nonetheless.
When I graduation from my masters program, I met one of my colleague's mom. Julie's father was a doctor and Julie's mom was nuts. At the ceremony, Julie's mom came up to me and said "I know you are married to a doctor. Good luck." She looked me in the eye, as if she could see my future, and that being married to a doctor is no slice of pie.
About ten years ago, I was sitting in the cafeteria one evening at my kids' elementary school for a NAMI (National Alliance on Mental Illness) Family-to-Family meeting where people would discuss the challenges of having a loved one with a major mental illness. I was there to discuss my brother and his battle with schizophrenia. I mentioned I was a mom, and my husband was a doctor. A woman in her mid-sixties with blonde hair looked at me intensely and said, "I was married to a doctor. I am now divorced and living in Section 8 housing with my mentally ill son."
The words of both women haunted me. Haunted isn't strong enough. Their words scared the crap out of me. I feared what they said would come true for me, that I would end up in a difficult marriage, divorced with a crazy child, living in public housing. I fought this vision. There was no way I was going to let my kid end up mentally ill if I could help it. If they did, I'd fight like crazy to get them the help they needed, but they weren't going to drag me down in the dregs with them. I saw my parents deeply struggle with my brother, but they did not implode with him.
I feared those women I had never before met were telling me my future, that they could see things that I could not.
This morning I woke up with a different realization. When those women saw me, they did not see my future. Instead, when they saw me, they saw their past. I was who they used to be: innocent, hopeful, naive. They failed to see my strength, my inner power that I didn't know I had until I was tested.
About a month or two ago, I went to a sha(wo)man. I had been meditating a lot, and I had few "clarities" that would occur at random times when I was not doing much of anything: looking at a calendar, hopping in the shower. I would almost call these visions, where I would get a snapshot of my future in a sentence that uninvitedly would enter my mind. My little clarities came in quiet moments when I wasn't expecting them, and I took them in as dispassionately as if I were reading the mail. Was I seeing my future? I called the shaman to see if she could help me figure these out, see what they meant, and most importantly to find out: was I crazy?
"There are a thousand possibilities for your life, your future," she said. "You tapped into three." Her words brought me a lot of comfort, and made sense. There isn't just one, predetermined future for me, or for the Boy.
There are a thousand possibilities, and this made me feel better. First, I am not crazy. These little epiphanies are showing me possible paths, possible choices, not a concrete road to a future that will happen. I can be open to these ideas, but not held hostage to them, either.
The difference between my own epiphanies and the evil eye from the other women is that these epiphanies are coming from my heart. The evil eye was coming from theirs.
How does this relate to the Boy going to college? His life, too, has a thousand possibilities. I need to honor his path and his possibilities. Sure, I am happy to put in him a place that knocks down some barriers and blockers to having choices, that lessens the fog, so he can see his future.
No comments:
Post a Comment