The Land of Lost Things

Two Thursdays ago I had a wallet. A wallet and a zip. A silver card case wallet in a red leather zippered clutch. The card case I've had since my 20s, the zippered clutch only a few years. Both carried cards and cash but mostly they carried me. Everytime I unzipped the one and pulled out the other, I touched leather and metal, clasps and zips that reminded me who I was. This may sound like an overstatement, but truly, the silver case in particular was the Essential Me. Maybe because I've had it so long - that case has seen me through Camden and Europe and through the move back to Vancouver, through first dates and marriage with Scott, through babies and first days of school. Every place I've paid for something over the last 20 years, that case was there with me.

Two Fridays ago, I realized both were gone.

[insert denial, grief, bargaining, anger, acceptance and replacement of all my cards and identification here]

At the bottom of my closet, I found my grandmother's old Birks bag, and in the bottom of that was a coin purse. As I collected new cards and new versions of me, I slid them into this inherited case and tried to make it mean something new.

Wednesday, I lost that one too.

Thursday around 12:34pm the universe whispered gently, Ask Lisa. So I sent this text: "I keep losing things and misplacing things and I want to weep even though I'm not in the Weep Zone of my cycle. What am I not hearing??? I feel like the world is speaking a language I don't know and I'm starting to feel so afraid."

Lisa replied, "I'm going to ceremony tonight. I'll ask. In the meantime, breathe."

So I took breaths and wept a bit and waited a bit more.

Lisa is... complicated. I won't write a biography here, but in addition to the regular old work/family/life things she is, she is also a healer. Somehow, along the way, I became a person who got a friend who loves a Creator and knows magik and hears Truth and speaks healing. I'm pretty sure my teen-aged youth group self prayed against people like her but I think it's possible her Trinity Western grad self would have joined me. Grace and years and goodness have thankfully freed us both.

And now I am healed.

Lisa went to the water's edge and listened for me. Her still-a-child son kept the fire. Earth, Water, Fire, for real.

And as always happens, the words I'd already heard but couldn't understand echoed back and as she gave them to me, one text message at a time, something eased.

Identity. Losing who I am. Becoming someone new. But in the journey between me and me, being pulled away from Actual Me and being tempted to become someone who is not me instead. Someone else who's fears I already know instead of the Me who's fears are new and newly terrifying. I was layering myself in inherited fears about worth and value, about being qualified to be ME. Family stories about secretly being frauds were coats easily layered over top of tender, vulnerable me.

I have just quit my job. I have just decided I will be a Writer. I have just decided I will be a Coach. I have just decided I will do and be the me I have long imagined I could be one day.

I have just taken off my Competent and Paid jacket and feel quite naked and under-dressed. No wonder all those old clothes are so tempting.

Sadly (happily), they are not mine. They will not serve me in this season.  But I wasn't listening to the voice that said so, and so I guess the source of that voice starting taking my shit. All the shit that told me who I was kept going missing. And not just my wallets. My phone. My notebook. I kept losing and misplacing and leaving behind all my things.

Three minutes after Lisa's texts arrived, Nate phoned. My latest wallet was on his desk. There are a thousand reasons why Nate having my wallet is it's own poetry but I will save those for another post.

"You have to not want to be afraid. You have to want to occupy your own power, part of which manifests through the fullness of the truth you're seeing."

Fear has been my constant companion for a long time but this next season requires me to not want to be afraid. That means saying no thank you to some of my inheritance; we are an anxious people, the women in my clan. Being anxious meant being In.

But for a season (or several, who can say?), being anxious and afraid is not who I am. The cord was cut by my beloved healer and Me in this season is picking up a different inheritance. That coin purse that is my Second Wallet belonged to my other grandmother; from her and her family I inherited Welcoming Others by Being Youself. The stoop starts in Grandma's backyard. Open-handed ease grew under her apple tree.

And so it begins, this season of ease. There is a lot to be afraid of, but it turns out, fear is not required anymore. I gift my red zip and silver case to the universe, a weird little sacrifice I guess, but I'm not the first human to let go of things to make space for Truth to show up.

A lot can change in two Thursdays. For me, I changed up which inheritance I'm spending. I blew through that first one in 20 years and it brought me all the way here. I am grateful for all of it and for what it afforded me. Who can say how long I can live on this one? It could take years to just remember it's there.

Regardless, there is no doubt there are two grandmothers in Heaven wondering how in the fuck their descendent got healed by a medicine woman down at the riverside via text message. I hope Jesus can explain it all for them.

Idiot

My kids both get straight As.

They both have good friends, more than one.

They can both talk to adults with ease and confidence.

They are comfortable meeting new people.

They can say how they're feeling with surprising accuracy.

They can play together for hours at a time.

They can read.

They are creators and builders.

They are funny.

They both have learned a sport.

They have both auditioned for and taken solos in school productions.

They can both swim.

They can both drive a boat and a dinghy.

They can both sail a Laser on their own.

They both say please and thank you.


Why do I feel like such a failure?

For real.

Why?

It turns out I wanted more than that? I'm an idiot.

I'm So Glad You Told Me

I don't read authors who write in a tone of voice that sounds too much like how I wish I sounded when I write. Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle Melton, Nadia Bolz-Weber... I hear they're amazing and that I'd love them so much. Oh well. They make me feel like shit, writing all their thoughts down first, so I just act like they're not there most of the time.

Sadly social media interferes with my campaign to make them not exist so I trip across what they think quite a bit. This long preamble to say, Brene Brown said something once and I read it lately by accident and now my whole life is different.  God knows what would happen if I read the rest of those assholes.

I think I've mentioned here that parenting has been more work than I wanted these last months. It has been for years really, but since late fall, things really took a turn for the dumpster fire and I wasn't altogether we'd all four make it through to the other side. I did what I do and spent most waking hours scouring the interwebs for hope. Looking for a solution that would cure what ailed us, ideally with only 5 or 7 minutes of effort.

Where I landed was where you all knew I would land: there is no shortcut to peace to be had - one can only decide to point themselves in the direction of peace and hope there are enough granola bars in your pockets to get you there. The trick is to find the straightest path there, and just keep taking the next right step*. For years. Years and years and years and years as far as I can tell.

For me, the path to peace seems to be marked Empathy Road. Correction Crescent, Angry Alley, Punishment Path and the Vale of Resentment and Tears all led to places I did not want to be anymore. But empathy - believing that a child wasn't giving me a hard time but was having a hard time and needed help handling that hard time - that brand of empathy and living with another seemed to lead to the place I most want to be. A place kind of like Hawaii - it's expensive and I'm never sure we should go, but I'm so relaxed and warm and happy there that I keep going back, embarrassed though I am that we spend so much to be there.

Meeting a child who's words and actions are awful with warmth and calm makes me look like an idiot. I worry all the time about teaching people (read: my children) they can treat me poorly when I don't demand they Stop That Right Now or All Manner of Goodness Will be Removed From Your World. I have judged a thousand mothers for letting their sweet progeny get away with being assholes.

And yet.

It turns out that shouting and stomping and demanding and insisting and drawing lines in sand and not giving in turned me into someone I loathed. Someone who cried in the dark and knew my adult children would drink because of me.

But as I really decided to listen to the whispered hurt behind the shouted angry words my child hurled my way, I discovered they told me what they were afraid of, and what they thought might go wrong. They told me they didn't know how to do the things asked of them out there in the world, and as often, not even the things asked here at home. They whispered, 'please help me'.

And so I started whispering back, 'okay'.

Because I have known my own self to be washed over with rage and anger when fear got the best of me. I have shouted curse words because they were easier to say than "I'm afraid I wrecked us." I have ranted and raved out loud while my sweet tender heart whispered "please help me turn this off". I have felt the rage grow and grow when instead of help I was offered criticism and disappointed dismissal.

Cruising the internet to learn about how to get to empathy eventually brought me to Brene Brown. Of course. In her TED talk, she includes in a script for empathy, "I don't know what to say, but I'm so glad you told me."

Everything is different now. I don't have to have solutions for my people. I just have to be grateful that they told me they can't. Even if they tell me with hurled sticks and stones and words that mean to hurt me.

I'm so glad you told me, I say. And thus find myself one step closer to peace.

As I said to my own mum a few weeks ago, I decided I'd rather regret grace.

May it be so.

Good Intention

What if it's true that all behaviour has good intention?

What if it turned out that the very worst things we do (yes, even that) are fuelled by a desire for something good to happen? 

I think about this a lot as a parent. I find it easier to stay calm in the middle of my child's shit-storm when I can find it in myself to believe that the child is trying to make something good happen and just got a bit derailed by hard stuff along the way. I am trying to remember that it may be true of my beloved husband too; that his worst transgressions against me, like eating too loud, may be in fact his own effort to make something good happen, like nutrition.

I've been thinking about it a lot, watching the most recent version of the world falling apart. It's horrendous, what's happening out there in the world. The planet is running out of steam for dealing with our bullshit, while we run out of steam for dealing with each other's bullshit, all of it happening faster and faster all the time. It's terrifying.

But.

It's also peace-making for me, now that I wonder about what good each bad actor is trying to make happen. What gets done is awful, but what is hoped for is wonderful. Heart-breaking often, these unmet bids for goodness with life-wrecking outcomes. But there is love in this heart for the heart that is seeking goodness, every time.

Life is a long, hard wander but the hunt for goodness has given me purpose along the way. So there's that.

Still Getting up Tomorrow

I thought we'd have problems.

I knew to expect it would be hard.

I know it to be absolutely, irrefutably, unceasingly true that Life Is Hard And Good and that we would end up walking the whole way with Hard and Good as companions.

I just thought that it would be a nicer kind of problem. A more pleasing kind of hard. That the walk would be challenging but only in ways I like.

I also thought that all the Hard we'd get would be Hard we are well-equipped to handle. That if we didn't have the tools to handle it, we'd happily and easily get the tools and then do the work and then Hard would be just one more thing that we were good at doing. That's really the heart of it there: I really thought we would be good at doing Hard and that because we were so good at it, it actually wouldn't be all that hard at all. 

It turns out that watching his grandmother slowly die over many months, and then watching his dad suffer a grievous injury and swimming in the bath was our life of pain and disappointment and pain and sadness and pain and anger - it turns out all of that left our boy a wee bit broken. It turns out that 3 is too young to think you saved your dad's life. It turns out that if your parents are a bit distracted by all of the above, they may not notice that you've become a bit anxious and worried and that your big feelings aren't just growing up feelings but are deep down, Life May Be Awful All The Time Feelings.

And if that goes on for five years and no one really figures it out and you find out that getting mad gets a lot of care and attention in your house, you may become a nine year old who is mad a lot. And your mad may get bigger and bigger as you get bigger and bigger until eventually it's just way too big for an eighteen-hundred square foot house.

When that happens, a mom might be surprised to discover that it turns out there is a Hard that isn't turned into beauty and goodness as quickly as she has long believed it can be. A mom and dad may discover that new tools don't fix broken things all the way or very quickly, if at all; that some broken just stays. A family may find out that Too Hard isn't an option and that the next day must be done, even if the day before was The Last Straw, a Bridge Too Far, More Than We Can Bear.

On days like that, sun is welcome and neighbours more and we just make some toast and write it down and hope Goodness shows up eventually.

That's what some of us do.