Two years ago today, the Boy broke his foot in a soccer game, which led to him not going to school, getting behind in his work, which made him not want to go to school. His anxiety and depression were already in force. He was "hovering over the treetops," like Jack used to say. When I hear this metaphor, I think of the scene in The Spirit of St. Louis where Charles Lindberg (played by Jimmy Stewart) barely gets his plane off the ground, nearly clipping the trees. Instead of rising above the trees, the Boy crashed.
A friend of mine who is a trauma therapist says "the body remembers," and she's right. Today and for the past several days, I have been fairly emotional. I think part of this (not all, but part) is because I have been unconsciously thinking back to where I was two years ago. I was talking to a friend about horoscopes and I read this in https://freewillastrology.com for my horoscope for next week:
Author Virginia Woolf said that we don't wholly experience the unique feelings that arise in any particular moment. They take a while to completely settle in, unfold, and expand. From her perspective, then, we rarely "have complete emotions about the present, only about the past.”
I am settling in with my emotions from the past two years. At the time, I didn't know that my life would unfold as it did. I felt like I was sliding down an icy ski slope, gaining speed, unable to dig my edges slow down or turn. I didn't know that when the Boy limped off the soccer field at Roosevelt High School, that that would be the last soccer game I would see him play in two years. I didn't know that would be the last time I would be with those families, those parents who I spent five years talking to on the sidelines, watching our boys grow into young men. Some seasons they were close to undefeated. Other seasons held few victories.
With death, we don't know when our time will come. But in our lives, there are lots of mini-deaths along the way: deaths of the way things were, or the way they used to be. I didn't know that two years ago was the beginning of the end, the death of my son's typical high school career.
My life isn't always complete disaster. I have had many "sweet spots" in my life, where things were going along swimmingly. I think of a sweet spot like the part of a tennis racket that makes a beautiful thump noise when the ball hits it, the part with all of the power. Or, a sweet spot could be the best part of a peach, after you eat through the fuzzy skin and before you get to the pit. While the Boy was imploding, my job was going well, and it was a sweet spot. I liked what I was doing, I was learning a ton, I liked the people I was working with, and the type and nature of the work blended well with my personality and interests. My job had kept me sane and was a source of stability when my family was imploding.
Now, the sweet spot of my job has imploded. I have reached the peach pit, the ugly, inedible part. Like Virginia Woolf said, the emotions I felt at the time of the implosion didn't manifest until months later. In short, my little work group was dissolved, disbanded in June, and then my work partner was laid off in August. In September, I learned I was passed up for a promotion as I was an analyst and not a developer.
Fine. I trudged along. I trudged and trudged and trudged. The more I trudged, the more irritable I became. I tried to claw and convince (argue with?) myself and my manager and my team that we needed to go back to the sweet spot, where my life was good. Why did my sweet spot turn into a peach pit?
Part of my problem is that I need to recognize that the sweet spot has gone, and something else is now in its place.
I was talking to a friend tonight and she reminded me of Glennon Doyle's recent book Untamed. Doyle talks about burning it all down, and then rebuilding. We need to burn things down if we want to rebuild them.
My life is burning down. The fire is already here, and uncertainty lies ahead. I could look at this with fear and trepidation.
Or I could say "Bring it on."
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