Final Draft!

 ...which is totally ironic because the name of my blog is "Rough Draft." Oh well.

I posted my first article to Medium.com. They had a writing contest and I was inspired.

Here you go! 

https://medium.com/@mcguirelauren

I'm not behind the paywall...yet!

Wilderness & Mercury in Retrograde: Part 2

Pedro's father was working twelve hour shifts at the hospital the week my son came back home. Instead of staying with his dad the house, Pedro decided to stay with me while I was working from home. I was grateful. I thought it was better that Pedro have someone to talk to when he woke up instead of being left alone in an empty house until dinnertime. And to be honest, I was grateful for the company. I just started a new job a few months earlier and I was lonely working at home during the pandemic. There were weeks where I only had one or two meetings. I didn't spend much time interacting with other people. At times, I felt like I was in solitary confinement. My quarantine prison cell had a nice view of the water, but the same could be said of Alcatraz.

For two months, Pedro lived with me. I felt like the time was an aberration--when you send your kids out in the world, they aren't supposed to come back as children. Two years ago, I had grieved his departure, and now he was home again. This felt like when the inner planets Mercury and Venus are in retrograde. There is an optical illusion when the planets appear to be moving backwards in their orbit around the sun. In fact, their orbits haven't changed at all. My son was home was a brief stop on his way out again.

I had been a busy mom for so many years, driving kids to soccer practices, going to band concerts, watching cross-country meets. Unexpectedly, I became an empty-nester two years earlier than expected, grieving that loss of time. Pedro's oldest sister had left for college the year before Pedro was sent away. I had been looking forward to the time Pedro had his chance to be an only child, to get his parents' full and undivided attention. I was looking forward to not having to manage two kids at the same time. I was looking forward to slowing down, and just having one kid to focus on. That was all lost. Now, he was back, just for a short bit, before he leaves for college.

While Pedro was moving from a group living situation, I had a roommate for the first time in a few years. At a basic level, I enjoyed it: I had someone to talk to over breakfast, someone to decide what do with for lunch. He was much more amenable to taking direction and taking care of himself. Sometimes he would forget to eat, but a gentle nudge from me telling him to get a bowl of cereal was not met with hostility. He would make jokes. Sometimes he would make me breakfast. I had to learn to be patient when he didn't do things as fast as I would have liked. It took him longer to get a job than I would have liked, but in the end he got a job walking distance from my apartment, which locked in where he was going to live for the summer.

The funny thing about life is that when it is easy, peaceful and serene, sometimes it isn't all that memorable. The blow-ups were few and infrequent. I often had to remind myself that my son was eighteen, not exactly the easiest age for young men. 

There was one instance about three weeks in. After I had finished work, Pedro and I drove forty-five minutes away to a local river to fly fish. On the dark trail back to the car with my headlamp lighting the way, Pedro started busting my chops about how I wasn't a good enough fly fisherman, how I wasn't taking those dream vacations I had on my bucket list, and on and on for an hour. I didn't tell him to stop or set a boundary or ask him to be kinder and gentler to his dear old mother. When I got home, I freaked out for letting him rag on me. Here it was, I was the one relapsing first, not Pedro. I was the one falling into old patterns.

I was terrified. What I couldn't do this? What if I couldn't effectively be a mom? What would happen to my son?

The next morning, a friend called and asked if I wanted to get out of town for the weekend. I said yes. I packed my bag and texted Pedro and his father that I taking off for a few days. I needed them to watch the dog.

"Are you okay?" Jack asked. He called when he saw my text. Instead of being angry or annoyed that I was leaving town and leaving him with the kid, Jack seemed worried about me.

"I need a break," I said. "I am falling back into my old ways." The old me would have asked Jack for permission, checking that his schedule was clear before I made any plans. Fuck it, I thought. If I don't get a break, I will completely lose my mind and that won't serve anyone. 

On the ride out of town, I called one of the other mom's at Pedro's boarding school. I was worried that Pedro would feel abandoned, that he would be mad at me forever. She cheered me on. 

"Go have a great time," Diana said. "You will be a better mom for this in the end." I needed the support from someone whose son also returned home this summer. She knew as close as anyone else could what I was going through.

On the trip, I went fly fishing with a guide along the Kootenai. I improved my cast and learned how to mend my line. I learned how to hook a fish once it bit the fly, and how to pull it in. I learned how to spay cast. And I caught five fish, including a beautiful fifteen inch rainbow trout.

When I got home, I talked about my fishing trip and how I took my paddleboard out on a lake. I was relaxed and happy. Pedro was actually happy for me.

Pedro had his relapse, too. One day at work, he was feeling overwhelmed and he came home in the middle of the day. This was a test for both of us: Would Pedro be able to bounce back from his set-back, and would I not freak out about it? Would I catastrophize and imagine my son never going to work again? Would he get fired? Would he decide it wasn't worth it to participate in the work force and give up? Would he become a sponge and never get a job and just fly fish for the rest of his life? I was an expert at mentally spinning out on the smallest gravel patch.

After all of the books and therapy sessions, the biggest beacon for me was Simone Biles and the twisties. What if I were her parents? Would I have been supportive of her not competing, or would I have told her suck it up, buttercup and get her butt on the beam? I was horrified that I might have been that nutjob parent. 

Internally, I was freaking out. Externally, I was calm. I asked Pedro what I could to support him. If he needed space, that was fine. I'd see him after I got back from paddle-boarding and we'd have dinner. The dog had surgery the day before. Before I left for the lake, I put the dog on Pedro's bed and asked him to take care of Fox. As I was leaving, the dog snuggled up next to Pedro. I saw Pedro's posture soften as he held the dog.

When I came back a few hours later, Pedro was restored. I don't know what did the trick: the dog, calling his girlfriend in Montana, or me giving my son space to sort through all of his mixed up and confused feelings. Maybe given the space, my son was able to tap into all of the emotional tools he had learned over the past two years, and work it out himself. Maybe it was all of those. 

Maybe part of it was just me and my view and reaction to my son's challenges. How often before would I try to swoop in and save him from unpleasant feelings, to fix his emotional bumps and bruises instead of letting him sit with his own feelings and figure it out? How hard was it for me to do something different, and not fall back into my rutted behavior? My re-entry to motherhood required me to use emotional muscles that I had never used before. I was a little sore--just like I was after learning to paddleboard--but I was in a much better place.

Just like Mercury's perceived backwards loop in his orbit, my loop back into parenthood came to an end as Pedro left for college last week. Now I get to re-enter another world: life without kids.

Wilderness & Mercury in Retrograde: Part I

[Hello, fair readers. I am going to enter this piece into a writing contest, which explains why this deviates from my usual style of writing about the day-to-day. You get to see the first draft.]

This summer, my son returned home to live with me in the brief window after he graduated from high school and before he went to college. I returned to full-time motherhood after a two year hiatus. After Pedro turned sixteen, he went to Wilderness therapy and then on to two years in a therapeutic boarding school. He was sent away by his father and I, but mostly me. Jack didn't think Pedro's crippling depression and anxiety was a real problem, but I did.

"It is not like he is doing drugs," said Jack.

"He isn't getting out of bed," I said. "He isn't going to school. He isn't participating in life." I didn't see how he going to get out of this funk without a major intervention.

Pedro had already thought his life was ruined: "If I don't graduate from high school, I won't go to college. If I don't go to college, I won't get a job. What is the point?" Every evening when I came home from work, I feared I would find my son dead in his bed. A few months before we shipped him off, Pedro knew he needed a change. "If I go to boarding school, I will be forced to wake up in the morning and go to class."

When a co-worker who suffered from anxiety and depression found out about Pedro's continuing low mood, he lambasted me for an hour: "How can you leave him home alone during the day? You have no idea how dark it can get." My friend had another bout of depression after he broke up with his long-time girlfriend. Weeks later, he found a replacement. As a mother, I don't have that option. There is no Tinder, JDate or Match.com for me to round up a random sixteen year old boy and call him my son.

Willingly, Pedro went to camp in the high desert in Colorado for eleven weeks surrounded by other lost boys and a team of therapists. While my son was sleeping under a tarp and learning to make fire from sticks, I was in my own emotional wilderness. Even though a good part of me was relieved that my son was getting the help he needed, I now needed to face the many issues I had neglected in my own life while focusing on my son. I was spinning and obsessing about everyone's life but my own. I worried about things outside of my scope of control. My life had become unmanageable.

Both of my son's programs required parental involvement. These were not places where you gave them a low functioning child and they send you back a fully formed and functioning adult human. Parent participation was key.

"If your child is here, you should be in therapy, too," said the leaders of the Wildie program. "Your child didn't get here alone."

"What did you contribute to your child's being here?" was a frequent refrain at the therapeutic boarding school. 

"I dragged him here like a wet bad of cement so he wouldn't kill himself," was my immediate reply in a group therapy session with other parents.

"Lauren, what are you doing to take care of yourself?" asked a more seasoned mother in the program. I burst into tears at the question. All I did was take care of other people. My own therapist often asked me what I wanted. I didn't understand the question. What I wanted didn't matter, as far as I was concerned.

During the two years my son was gone, I wish I had gone to wilderness therapy, where I could skip out on my current reality, practice meditation and yoga, and sleep under the stars. Instead, I worked my day job full-time and in my spare time I went to family therapy and a twelve step program. I meditated and prayed. I read books on self-awareness and parenting challenging teens. Everything had the same theme: You need to change yourself if you want your world to change.

My re-entry into parenthood wasn't planned. Initially, Pedro was going to live with his father and stay in his old bedroom when he came back from boarding school. If I wanted Pedro to stay with me at all over the summer, I would need to convert the landing in my condo--which was serving as my home office during the pandemic--into a welcoming bedroom. Like a new mom, I was nesting: making new curtains for the room, moving out my desk making room for a bed, making space in my closet for my son's clothes. I was reading parenting books like I was cramming for an exam. Instead of What to Expect When You're Expecting, I was reading The Parallel Process, Not Left to Chance, and The Journey of the Heroic Parent, along with other favorites like Untamed and Man's Search for Meaning. For fun, I would watch Schitt's Creek to see how one dysfunctional family could pull themselves back together. To be honest, I hadn't read a few of the half dozen parenting books recommended. Was I missing a secret that would have explained everything? Should I bother reading these books now, or was it too late? Would it make any difference?

The books could not answer any of my real doubts: Could I parent this child who was gone for two years? Would he slide back into his old patterns and not get out of bed again, watching YouTube videos and looking at Instagram? Would I slide back into my old patterns of walking on eggshells around him, fearing if I made my son upset he would kill himself? Would I be able to speak up? Would we both relapse and regress, making a waste of the past two years of progress?

["Tune in tomorrow to find out..." 😁]

Exhausted & Jigsaw Puzzle Mecca

I am exhausted.

Utterly exhausted.

I probably should just go to bed, but instead I'll write about how tired I am.

I feel like I gave birth and after a big, eighteen year push, I am done.

I can rest.

The Boy is out the door, out of the house, out of the nest. He is out. Out of my hair. There is a Boy sized hole in my heart.

Tuesday, the Boy moved into his dorm. Wednesday, he hung out in College Town with his father and I, with no complaints and no demands. He was perfectly accommodating to everything we wanted to do.

"Do you want to stop at a bakery cafe and get coffee?" Sure.

"What to stop at this cute gift shop and poke around?" Sure.

"Lunch?" Sure.

"Hike?" Sure.

"Do you need anything?" Not really.

Wow. It was a lovely day, and also surreal. Normally, the Boy doesn't like us that much. But now that we were in College Town, to the Boy we were familiar. And familiar is safe.

Today was different. The Boy texted and said he was fine. He didn't need anything. I burst into tears.

Tears of sadness, relief, and joy. Salt water can have so many shapes, colors, meanings. It can be clear, or it can match the color of the sky. It can be a tear or it can be the ocean.

Of course, I worry. The opposite of worry is faith. I can hope and wish for faith. Wishing for faith is a substitute for real faith, but it is a starting point. 

The best I can do while the Boy is away, is to take care of myself. After I cried, Jack drove to Jigsaw Puzzle Mecca, a side trip on the way to the airport from College Town to Seattle. I had fifteen minutes in the store. I picked out two puzzles, both of which were cheaper than the condo I bought when Claire-Adele left for college. 

Birds for Ada, fish for the Boy. After Ada died, I became very fond a Robert Frost poem about his daughter's death. Her voice melded into the song of the birds. "The song of the birds will never be the same. And to do that to birds is why she came."

The Boy hasn't died, and yet I grieve. I will miss him, and I am glad he gone. I am happy for him, though he isn't happy yet for himself. He will be, though, I hope. He will be.

The Paradox of Motherhood

The Boy is leaving the nest today. We are flying him to college. Of course, this is sad for me. I've enjoyed having him around this summer. Having him in my day-to-day makes me realize how much I've missed these past two years when he was "sent away." Not my first choice, but necessary.

There is a Bible story about the wisdom of King Solomon, who served as a judge. (I learned this story--I'm not kidding--in kindergarten. It had a super big impression on me, but I might be fuzzy on the details. Anyhoo...) Two women went before King Solomon both claiming that they were the mother to the same child. Solomon had to determine who the real mother was, so he said he would cut the child in half and they could share.

One of the women screamed, "No! Don't! She can have the child." Solomon knew the real mother would rather see her child live away from her than die.

I can relate to the screaming mother.

Anyway, yesterday and this morning, Pedro been angsty and irritable. I was a little weepy about him leaving. He told Jack he didn't want me to be sad, which is fair. 

So then Pedro was upset and saying he didn't want to go to college. Here in enters the Paradox of Motherhood. Was I happy that he didn't want to go to college twelve hours before we were supposed to leave? 

No.

No.

Hell no.

No.

I internally panicked and freaked out.

"He's leaving tomorrow. Where he is going is yet to be determined," I thought. "If doesn't get on that plane to college town, I am packing up all of his shit and he can live with his dad."

Our flight to college town was delayed for more than twelve hours. Fortunately, we were able to go back to the condo and hang out. He apologized for being angsty, and I thanked him.

"Just because I am sad because you are leaving doesn't mean I want you to stay," I said. "I am happy to kick you out of the nest."

He laughed. Someday, when his kiddo goes off to school, maybe he will relate.

Only the French...

...can have a highly regarded television show where a lesbian gets pregnant in a three-way with her boss.

In most shows, this scenario would either be in a sitcom of craziness or a melodrama or a soap opera.

Nope. This is Call My Agent on Netflix (aka Dix Pour Cent in France) an office drama where talented people flounder and flail in the personal and professional lives. Just like real people, except their jobs involve movie stars.

Kudos to Camille Cottin for playing a smart, hardworking woman with an indiscriminate sex life with dignity, grace and complexity.

Simone, Self-Care and the Twisties

Pedro is a skier. When he skis, he pushes his limits jumping over hills at high speed, hopefully to land safely on packed snow. It is beautiful and sublime to watch people jump on skis. It is also terrifying. One of Pedro's friends was skiing at Mt. Hood this summer and broke his leg. My motto to Pedro is "Ski so that you can ski another day." If he chickens out on a jump, that is fine with me. I trust that he and only he knows when he feels safe.

As everyone on Earth already knows, Simone Biles, the 24 year old GOAT of women's gymnastics, bailed on the Olympics. She was doing a vault when she got the "twisties," a gymnastics term for the mind losing track of the body in the middle of a complicated trick. She claims she was suffering from stress and wanted to protect her "mental health."

Why must we distinguish between "health" and "mental health"? Like it is okay to bail if you broke your leg but not okay if you broke the concentration and focus required to do the physically near impossible? As an athlete, Simone Biles isn't just a body. She has a mind, too. Her mind is just as--if not more--important than her arms and her legs.

This is a remarkable amount of self-care to be on one of the largest stages in the world and step back. As my mom used to quote some dead English guy (I'm too tired to google the exact quote), "Discretion is the better part of valor." Simone is the greatest in the world, but knowing when to stop allows her to vault another day. Simone used her discretion, and that took guts. Likewise, her discretion likely helped her to get so far in the first place.

I know millions of people are commenting on Simone, but how are those who are nearest and dearest to her supporting her? Her coaches, her teammates, her family, her friends? Her mom, her dad, her siblings, her grandma? Are they asking her WTF? Or, are they giving her a hug, telling her she has their love and support, no matter what, that they respect her right to take care of and protect herself.

I think of myself and the people I know. Am I as kind and gracious when people I know and love bow out, on smaller stages, on things that are moderately important but not epic? In the past few weeks, I have known a few people who have imploded, who said "I need to take a step away from my life right now." (I did it myself a few weeks ago.) 

How do we hold these people when they break? Do we push them? Do we allow them to slide? Do we hold them? I'd like to imagine Simone's family, wrapping her in their arms, telling her they love her. I imagine that I would do the same. But would I? Have I in the past? Or, was I jerk who pushed my friends and family--mostly my kids--to do things they didn't want to do? There is encouraging. There is enabling. There is letting people have the right to listen to their own inner voice that tells them what they need to do to stay safe. 

A friend of mine said she told her son, "I have faith that you can take care of yourself." I told my imploding friend "I am here if and when you need me. Let me know that you are safe, otherwise I will give you time to sort things out, to feel your feelings. It sit with those feelings, uninterrupted. I will welcome you back when you are ready. 

"Remember I love you."

Thank you, Simone. You made me think how I treat myself and those I love when we need to step away. Thank you for teaching me to be kinder and gentler to myself and to those I love.

I Fear Dying of Climate Change

I was reading the New York Times the other day when I saw the Quote of the Day followed by the "Here to Help" article.

In case you can't read this picture above, the quote of the day is from a Russian who is fighting fires in Siberia as the permafrost is melting. "This is not a phase, this is not a cycle--this is the approach of the end of the world."

Followed immediately below, is an article summarized as "OMG! Bathing suits cost $250? WTF?"

Right.

Rome is burning and we are worried about how much bathing suits cost. More specifically, Oregon, Washington and California are burning, blowing smoke into the jet stream and floating as far east as Maryland and New England. Russia is burning. Europe is flooding. Seattle had a heat dome a few weeks ago where temps reached 108F.

My son is a fisherman. He has gotten me interested in the sport.

Fish are dying in Montana. Having lived in Montana for two years, Pedro learned to fly fish. He reads voraciously about rivers and trout and flies. He also reads about how the rivers are warming up and killing off the fish. While one could ask, why do I care about fish? If you care about fish, then you also care about people. Fly fishing brings in $500M a year to the state of Montana, which is lots of jobs.

I can see why people focus on bathing suits instead of climate change. Buying a bathing suit is in my control. Containing forest fires and floods is out of my scope. Plus, most days climate change isn't a big deal.

Until it is. My daughter is coming to town next week, as is Pedro's girlfriend. I ordered 50 KN95 masks in case we get smacked with forest fire smoke while they are here. (I already googled that the KN95s which are the Chinese standard are just as good for smoke as are the N95s.)

Do I really think I am going to die of climate change? Not specifically, but it is now on the list of things I could die from. Before I thought the most likely cause of my death would be due to being overweight and out of shape. Think getting Type 2 diabetes, heart disease, or a cancer.

Jack, Pedro and I were eating dinner, and Jack said the coronavirus was a bigger threat than climate change. I can see his point, as the docs at his hospital are still taking care of people who are dying because they didn't get vaccinated. Yet, Pedro and I disagreed with him.

"When the virus is contained, climate change will still be here."

We can do two things: We can try to stop climate change and all drive electric cars and whatnot, or we can figure out ways to live with fires and floods and other biblical levels of catastrophes. 

Or, we could do both.

Or, we could do nothing. 

Doing nothing is a bad idea. First the fish die, and then us. I know we all will eventually die, but no one wants to die unnecessarily, before our time and due to otherwise preventable causes.

We could get closer to the fish, to the waters and the streams, to help us realize the smallest things we need to protect.

Newton's Fourth Law of Therapy & Why I Meditate

"For every problem in the child (identified patient), there is an equal and opposite problem in the parent."

                                                                                        -- Pedro's Fourth Law of Therapy

A friend of mine recently asked me about my meditation practice. We didn't get a chance to finish the conversation, but my first thought was because meditating doesn't cause a hangover like gin and tonics do.

I'm kidding.

Sometimes you can get a meditation hang-over.

I'm kidding again.

I meditate because it clears the noise and busyness in my mind, giving my soul a chance to speak. 

In Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Towards an Undivided Life, Parker Palmer writes about his battle with depression. While there are dozens of reasons why people get depressed (and cures), he describes his own depression rising from "burying true self so deep that life becomes one long, dark night of the soul." His depression "was the soul's call to stop, turn around, go back, and look for a path [he] could negotiate...When I was living my outer life at great remove from inner truth, I was not merely on the wrong path: I was killing myself with every step I took... We can reclaim our lives only by choosing to live divided no more. It is a choice so daunting...that we are unlikely to make it until our pain becomes unbearable, that pain that comes from denying or defying our true self."

I meditate in the hopes of aligning my inner and outer life, and meditation is one of my many hedges against insanity. My flavor of crazy isn't depression -- it is a spinning and obsessing mind, constantly trying to avoid and control and figure things out so nothing bad ever happens, which is impossible. Bad things do happen. Of course I want to be careful and not careless, but there should be a word that means being too careful to the point of failing to thrive. My favorite elementary school teacher Ms. Kolin affectionately called me a worrywart. If she had seen me two years ago, she would have called me the worry-melanoma.

I can hide my worry-wart-ness from the public and co-workers, but privately I can spin and spin and spin, which is unhealthy, not just for me but for my kids. See the Fourth Law of Therapy: for every problem in a kid, there is an equal and opposite problem in the parents. In the past two years since Pedro was away, I've had a lot of time to do my own inner while Pedro was doing his. 

Unfortunately, there isn't yet a drug for worry-wart-ness. The only way out for my disease is through. 

And so I meditate.

"Professional"

I was at coffee the other day with a new friend I made during the pandemic. She has a kid about Pedro's age and we were comparing notes about teenage boys. This mom is super smart and well educated, just like most of my friends. (I would never say I have dumb friends. Why would I be friends with someone if I thought they were dumb? That makes no sense. I do however, have some friends who never finished college, and that is fine, too.)

Where was I? This woman is also a professional. She has a professional job and is very competent at what she does.

Competent.

You know how sometimes you are sitting across the table with someone for coffee and you realize you are looking in the mirror, and you discover something about yourself that you NEVER saw about yourself until you sat down with them? Recently, I went to dinner with a friend and we had butterscotch pudding for dessert, passing up carrot cake and some decadent chocolate thing. I would never order butterscotch pudding ahead of anything chocolate.

And the butterscotch pudding was delicious. See? I learned I like butterscotch pudding! Who knew? I also realized I like cocktails better than wine! Again, who knew?

Back to the main point. We often learn about ourselves through other people.

This woman was just like 95% of the moms in NE Seattle. There is nothing unique or exceptionally different about her: all women in NE Seattle are exceptional and unique. 

I have had the same conversations with many moms over and over again. Maybe this distance in time and space from the quarantine allowed me to uncover this. Maybe it is because I no longer live in NE Seattle. 

As parents (moms aren't the only ones who do this), how often do we apply a professional approach to dealing with our kids? How often do we treat them like colleagues instead of kids? How often do we connect with our kids head-to-head, and not heart-to-heart? Our children might come crying to us with a broken heart, and we give our kids an intellectual solution?

How much of our professional culture has infected our homes? Kids aren't residents or fellows or interns or Analysts in our families. We aren't there to train them in the ways of the professional world.

I grew up in home where my dad was a professional. He does my taxes (thankfully) every year and he offers me advice on how to manage this long-term care insurance law that is hitting the State of Washington. All of that is well and good, but what I most love about my dad is I can call him when I am happy, sad, frustrated and/or thrilled with the world. (I mostly call about the things I am frustrated, worried, annoyed or sad about, TBH.)

Does he respond to me in a "professional" manner, giving me advice? Nope. He just listens. He meets me heart-to-heart.

Where did me and my friends lose our way? Did we fell like we needed to raise our kids to become professionals, so therefore we must treat them as such?

I need to stop. I need to focus more on being a mom and meeting my kids where their heart is at, not as much their heads. School and work can and will meet them where their heads are, but they won't meet them where their heart is. That is why we have family and friends, people who care about us and want to understand our hearts.

Lily Pads and Lotuses, and the Wonder of the Water

This evening I took my paddleboard to Green Lake and I actually stood up on it. 

Yay! Go me!

Below is a map of my excellent adventure.

I started up at the northwest corner of Green Lake. The water was calm and still so I decided to stand. Which is the first real time I've stood on my paddleboard since I've owned it. When I paddleboarded in Tofino on Vancouver Island, British Columbia, I stood up just fine. Since then, I've gotten a case of the jitters. I don't feel so bad since 80% of the paddleboarders I see in Seattle are also sitting. Standing was fine, except I couldn't look around. I was too focused on the water directly in front of me instead of looking around for birds.

The yellow line is where I stood on my paddleboard. The green is where I sat. At the end of the first yellow, I heard the wind roar through the trees and punted--I was back on my bottom.

As I turned south, the wind and the waves picked up. My paddle board rocked in the water, but I was moving along fine. I had to paddle on my left side to keep my board going in a straight line. As soon as I switched to my right hand, I was turning and heading straight back to shore. This is interesting, I thought. it was harder than I thought, but I was doing okay.

Part of my problem is that I didn't really think of Green Lake as a real lake. I've walked around it hundreds of times since I moved to Seattle, but this is only the second time I've been in or on the water. I had thought of it like a Disneyland lake or something equally contrived and perfect and not impacted by forces of nature. I mean, it is not like Lake Washington or Lake Union or the Puget Sound. I had thought those were real bodies of water. Green Lakes was like--meh--not a real lake. The first time I paddleboarded on Green Lake last weekend, it was easy-peasy. The weather was hot and sunny and water was calm. There was a gentle breeze. Most of the people on the water were laying down on their paddleboards either sleeping or sunbathing. 

Not so today. The wind and waves were such that if I stopped paddling I would have drifted to shore.

"This is kind of hard," I thought realizing that Green Lake is a real lake. If I am struggling on this glorified pond, how on earth did people manage to get across the ocean before steam engines were invented? I started humming Row, Row, Row Your Boat to myself to distract myself from the wind and waves.

Once I got to the south end of the lake, I turned around to head back. I wanted to paddle past my favorite part--the lily pads and lotuses.

Except I couldn't. 

I turned around just fine, but I was rowing against the wind and the current, which were not subtle. I looked to the shore and I saw a father and daughter walking. I paddled and paddled and I looked at the shore again.

I saw the same father and daughter, except this time they were watching me. That was when I realized I wasn't moving. I paddling and staying in the same spot.

Which totally sucked.

I wanted to go to the lily pads and then back to my car, but the wind and water had other plans.

I was at the opposite end of the lake from where I parked my car. I seriously considered taking my board ashore and walking a mile and a half carrying my paddleboard back to the parking lot. The paddleboard isn't super heavy, but it is cumbersome. It is a pain in the neck just to get it the 200 feet from the parking lot to the water. I didn't think I'd make the mile walk. Maybe if there were an unexpected thunderstorm I would have gotten out of the water, but this is Seattle. We don't have thunderstorms.

Instead of paddling towards the lily pads, I went in a direction that I could go, where the wind and water would take me. I ended up heading straight north, and I was able to clip along fine without getting stalled.

I still wanted to see the lily pads, so once I made it far enough north, I tried to cut over to the left.

Success! I saw the lily pads! I started to stall a little bit again, so I got back to a spot where the water and wind would take me.

I paddled past Duck Island, where I saw a dozen ducks going home after a day of ducking. Just east of Duck Island, the wind was minimal. I took off my shoes, tucked them into my bungee cords and stood up. I paddled my way back to the launch spot.

In typical Seattle fashion, I saw both a beautiful heron standing majestically on a log, and a rat scampering along the shoreline, probably cleaning up after a day of picnics at the park.

But that is the wonder of the water.

If I Could Re-live a Year...

This week, I was talking to a prospective mom for my son's former therapeutic boarding school. It is not uncommon to get phone calls from these parents, especially during the pandemic when it was impossible to visit programs in person. 

Like many of the moms who call, this one was a train wreck, bless her heart. Looking back, I am sure I was worse when the Boy was at the same stage. 

Instead of talking about the school, I told her more specifically about my own experience:

"I wish someone had told me cold when I was starting this that the best thing any parent can do is take care of their own problems. Address that drinking issue. Get help for the workaholism. Figure out how to get rid of your co-dependency. Dig behind your ego and emotions and find your soul. If nothing else, take care of the basics: meditate, drink enough water, get enough sleep, find community and exercise."

When I was done talking to her, I thought about what I was like back then, before the Boy was sent away. I wish I had known then what I know now. "Experience is the comb nature gives you after you lose your hair," said my 9th grade English teacher. 

I know I am supposed to live in the present, blah, blah, blah, but as a thought experiment I wondered if I could relive a year of my life, which year would it be? A year that was fun and nearly perfect, or a year where I struggled and stumbled?

I came down to two: my freshman year of college and the year the Boy fell apart.

My freshman year of college was good. It was fun, I learned a lot about myself living on my own for the first time, minus the need to pay my own way. It was filled with collective effervescence. 

As far as bad years go, I would definitely skip the year Ada died, the year my brother's mental health imploded, and the pandemic, but maybe I would relive the year the Boy went away. It was so hard and heart breaking, but if I could go back and do it again with what I know now, I would have been so much more peaceful, calm and serene. Maybe some of it would have rubbed off on the Boy, helping him heal faster. I think about how much I obsessed that year, about everything and everyone instead of focusing on myself. I think of all of the bad habits I've since broken. Would I want to relive this year as a test, to see if really could do better? Maybe I just imagine that I could have handled it all, but maybe it really wouldn't be that different?

Maybe I wish I had learned what I needed to learn faster, but that is the challenge of learning as an adult--I don't often learn things until I am forced, until the status quo is too painful that I am forced to grow.