After the storm has passed the real work begins...

You think that the storm is the bad part, but it is really the clean-up and rebuilding that takes guts.

Here I am with a little over a week left in Eureka. I wish I could see into the future. I try to stay optimistic, but it’s difficult.

Two out of three of my children are not speaking to me. I am going back to Texas to try to rebuild my relationships with my children. It seems like my life has crumbled around me, blasted apart. I need to mend, pick up the pieces and bind myself back to my family. They need me; I need them.

I feel like the thin, fabric veil was rent, torn apart in one short sentence: “I don’t love you anymore.”

This whirlwind started that night, a storm of pain that I had been trying to hold in was let loose and consumed me and my family. I know now that the pressure had been building for some time. Even when I tried to sit calm in the eye of the storm, the damage was happening all around me. Pretending it wasn’t happening didn’t help. Giving in to the force of the storm and riding the winds and waves didn’t make it stop. I feel like I have been thrown clear, washed up on a distant shore, a car stuck in a tree after the water recedes. I see the desolation and destruction all around me. It seems like an almost insurmountable task to try to clean up the damage and move forward.

Hurricane Ike hit Galveston a few months after we moved back to the Gulf coast. I was in Friendswood, so I was not in the worst part of the storm, but I remember the wailing of the wind, the crack of the transformer blowing, the relentlessness of the rain. My ancestors survived the 1900 storm; I tried to imagine what it must have been like for them in that house, cowering on the upper floor while the water of the Gulf tried to reclaim the island. My great-grandfather Willie didn’t let it wash them away. I have a picture of the house after the storm, rubble piled all around it, even a boat leaning up against the house.

You think that the storm is the bad part, but it is really the clean-up and rebuilding that takes guts.

Like so many people do after natural disasters like hurricanes, I wanted to just move away, leave the devastation behind me. It seemed easier to just move on and start over somewhere else. The problem is that in doing that I had to leave behind almost everyone that I loved. I kidded myself by thinking that was ok. It wasn’t ok. When my oldest son stopped responding to my calls and texts, I knew just how wrong that I had been.

So I am going back to Texas.

I am going to do anything and everything I can to clean up this mess. My three children are the most important people in the world to me. I need to show them that.

The storm is over. It is time for the hard work of cleaning and rebuilding. It’s going to take some time and a lot of hard work and dedication.

I know I can’t do this alone.

Namaste’ ya’ll.

Treading water

Dhumavati

This morning I talked to Meg, a friend of mine from church back home. She is an older woman, a former nun, who always welcomed me with open arms and held me on my last visit to Good Shepherd as I cried, unable to bear the sight of my ex-husband with his new girlfriend and my children going to communion. It was my last visit to church before I left for California. I told her that I had run away because I felt that everything that I was and had been was gone. I came to California hoping to start a new life, but I have been pulled back by my need to be a parent. My children still need me, and I need them. Just because I am no longer married to their father does not mean I can't be their mother. I am not giving that up; time with my children, the people I love, is too precious.

At the time, though,  I didn't know how to face my loss. She told me that I had done the right thing, that everything would work out as it should, that I was loved, and that I could come home without shame or regret. She also told me to "tread water" in these last weeks in California.

"Stop trying to swim," she said.

I realized that I had been fighting the current that I thought I had just been flowing with.

But this was something more.

"Treading water" means to neither allow the flow of the water to take you nor to try to swim against it.
To tread water is to attempt to stay afloat, to use the least amount of energy to stay in one place with your head above the waves in order to avoid drowning.

After we talked, I meditated a bit and then found myself reaching for Sally Kempton's book Awakening Shakti, which details the different goddesses of yoga. I have been reading this book for many months, meditating on one goddess at a time. Durga helped me find strength, Khali destroyed and helped me clear, Parvati taught me devotion.

Today, I opened to Dhumavati, the goddess of loss and dissolution, the goddess of smoke. She is not one of the favored ones; she is not beautiful. Her boon is the resurrection after losing everything. Facing her and looking into her eyes means facing all the fears of being alone and without all the things that one has been accustomed to having. I have been running from her.

Meg asked me what troubled me most. I told her that the loss of relationship with my children and the sense that I had lost my identity were my greatest torments.

She told me that I still was myself, that I would find my true self in this loss, and that I would one day see that I had become even more true to myself than I had ever been because of it.

Until then, I need to tread water.

Namste' ya'll.

big yellow taxi

“Don’t it always seem to go…that you don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone…”

I have had to face quite a few realities lately.

When you lose everything that you thought was important to you, that is what tends to happen.
It certainly puts things into perspective.

I had the seemingly perfect life, and yet I was unhappy. Was it my circumstances or my attitude that made it so?

I think I had to lose it all in order to see the truth.

It was me.

Ok, it wasn’t just me.
Relationships are a two-way street and in families, it’s really one of those cloverleaf interchanges on the freeway; the more people are involved, the harrier the exchange of traffic.

I think I had to step back in order to get some perspective.

I had to go far, far away.

“No matter where you go…there you are”

There are so many simple things that I miss.

But mostly, I miss my family.

The things I lost: the house, the car, the job…those were nothing.

What is important are the relationships with my family and friends. Those things you can never replace. Sure, you can make new friends, start a new family, but unlike material possessions, no two individuals are exactly alike. I will never again be able to spend time with my father or grandparents. People I loved dearly and who at the time, I didn’t realize I could lose forever.

I have blown up relationships with the people I love.

It started with my mother. Now that I have experienced the other side, I am horrified at my behavior towards her over the years. I still have time to work on that but maybe not so much.

My children are growing up, but that does not mean I need to abandon them. And, I have.

I have been in so much pain over my divorce that I have been unable to see that.

I want to be with my boys. I want to have a relationship with my mother. I want to mend my relationship with my daughter.

I am missing so much.

I feel like I have been asleep for the past year. I thought I was being present, but I was napping.

And the nightmare started.

I was so hurt by losing my husband’s love. It was something I relied upon. Something that I thought I could never lose. But, a big, yellow taxi took it away.

I know that it sounds old-fashioned, but I married for life. I took those vows seriously. I never expected to break them. I thought we would grow old together. I was sure of it; maybe, too sure.

But it wasn’t so, and when it happened, I couldn’t even imagine living in a world where it wasn’t.

What I have learned is that even if I am no longer John’s wife, I am still Sarah, Bobby, and Jackson’s mother. I just have to figure out how to do that in a different context, no matter how badly it hurts.

Maybe Sarah was right; it’s not about me.

Namaste’ ya’ll.