Month: August 2017

We Learned the Sea

/ mindfulmusings4you / Leave a comment

I’ve heard recommended a few times recently that if you’re writing a story, or planning an event, it helps to start at the end, see the complete vision, and work your way backwards, thus creating the pathway for arriving at your destination.

The Ending. That’s the hardest part. It’s blurry. I can’t quite fathom it. Beneath my senior yearbook photo, my future plans read, *Small, midwestern liberal arts college (name withheld to protect the innocent), Psychology, Fall in love, Be happy.

No mention of kids, or marriage, specifically. But I definitely got those. Graduated, too, though not as a psych major (a crush on a boy DJ on the campus radio station, lead me to the Communications department. I wound up a Mass/Comm major.) I did the fall in love thing and got married after college, though the “be happy” bit has been more of a challenge.

I guess true happiness, or true love, remains elusive when, deep down, you expect that it will come from somewhere or someone outside of yourself.  And in order to get love, you really have to be able to first give it, starting with yourself. Unlike that scene in When Harry Met Sally, self love isn’t so much something you can fake, cause you’d know. So, really really, you have to believe that you are worthy of love.

It’s a terrifying idea, worthiness. And yet, I have many friends. Even now, as I’ve been trying on transparency in my relationships, telling the whole truth and being completely vulnerable, revealing warts and all, I am learning that I am worthy. In fact, my friends who loved so called, “perfect me,” still love “flawed me,” maybe even, a little bit more so.

So I guess the sign that hung in my childhood kitchen was true: Not the one that said, “Fuck Housework,” though I could get behind that concept. But rather, the one with the little skunk that said, “A friend is someone who knows all about you, but loves you anyway.” Shouldn’t THAT be the kind of friend that I am to myself? Whoa, isn’t that what God is? Someone who knows all about you and loves you anyway?

A friend shared this beautiful Hafiz poem earlier today:

You could become a great horseman
And help to free yourself and this world
But only if you and prayer become sweet lovers.
It is a naive man who thinks we are not engaged in a fierce battle
For I see and hear brave foot soldiers all around me going mad,
Falling to the ground in excruciating pain
You could become a victorious horseman
And carry your heart through this world
like a life giving sun,
But only if you and the Great Spirit
become secret lovers.

What if, rather than being in control, rowing upstream, I put the oars inside the boat and just see where the current, the love, takes me? What then? Maybe then, I’ll be able to begin, at the end of my story.

(Blog post title borrowed without permission from Dar Williams. Though I don’t think she’ll mind terribly).

We Send Our Children to the Moon

/ mindfulmusings4you / Leave a comment

Today was my first born’s last first day of school and my youngest’s first day of 8th grade. It is the first time, since becoming a mom seventeen years ago, that I have missed the beginning of a new school year. My husband of 25 years and I are in the first month of a 90-Day Therapeutic Separation. I wasn’t home when the kids woke up this morning.

Since the end of July, I’ve been living as a part-time single parent in a comfortably-outfitted, 2-bedroom sublet in the Wilds-of-Suburbia, USA. It’s a nice place, high ceilings, great morning light, friendly neighbors. It’s a few miles away from the house where my kids are. Where this morning, they made their own peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, as they’ll do every Thursday and Friday morning this fall, when they’re not with me. It’s what we’ve worked out, though I’m not sure the kids see this aspect of the agreement as particularly therapeutic for anyone.

We’re good people. We believed in love. But somewhere along the way we forgot to water the houseplants, to leave a note on the bedside table, to kiss each other good night. What had worked in our marriage, or what we thought had worked, was to have accepted this nice, blindfolded life. Kids were happy; healthy. Friday night fire pits in the cul-de-sac were filled with craft beer and delivery pizza. And, as long as you didn’t look too closely–as long as you didn’t squint–everything seemed kind of perfect. I guess I squinted.

After years of sharing living quarters but not sharing lives, I was reminded by someone other than my husband what it felt like to be noticed, feminine, beautiful. And now, here I am and there they are.

The “therapeutic” part of the separation means that we’re supposed to be working on things, figuring it all out, coming back together. But, what happens if I discover that I like the version of me that lives in this apartment alone (part-time) and single parents (part-time) better than the one who stands at the kitchen sink, invisible?

In these twenty-seven days thus far, I’ve begun to recognize myself — that person that used to be me, before I gave that all up to be his better half; their mom. I like to have time to write, to contemplate, and I concur with Lucy Kaplansky’s lyric, “If I’m going to be alone, I’d rather be by myself.”

This morning my girls got themselves up, packed their own lunches, their instruments, sat on the stoop for the annual first-day photo. I wasn’t there. But, they knew that I was nearby, learning how to be happy, how to love, how to take care, not just others, but also myself. And that’s a great lesson, even when your mom isn’t there on the first day of school.

“It felt like the first day of school
But I was going to the moon instead”
The End of the Summer, Dar Williams


(Blog post title used with permission by Dar Williams.)