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.

If you are travelling with a child or someone who requires assistance, secure your mask on first, and then assist the other person. –Airline Hostess

One thing that I have not written much about, but which is really the most difficult part of my divorce is the change in my relationship with my children.

I miss them.

I miss being a Mom.

All of my children are nearly grown. They are not little kids. Even the youngest had mostly begun to see me as a food source; “What’s for dinner, Mom?” seemed to be the only topic of conversation in the last few years.

My daughter is an adult in her late twenties and the boys are late teenagers. They all have lives to live, and that separation from the mother had already begun long before the divorce proceedings.

When I left, part of my reasoning was that they did not seem to need me anymore. They were settled into their lives with their father, and I felt like I was no longer needed. My daughter had shunned me for most of the time leading up to the divorce, angry and hurt. Just walking into my old home was so painful, I could barely stand it. Taking my kids out to dinner was awkward, and I often felt like I was intruding on their lives. I didn’t want my sons to start to resent me the way my daughter seemed to. I was in so much pain that I didn’t know how to relate to being the “absent parent.”

My daughter kept telling me that this wasn’t about me, to which I still have no response. How could my divorce not be about me? Everyone else seemed to be moving on, staying with the same attachments, while I was flapping my wings and trying to take flight.

“Taking flight” has a double meaning: I could be flying away from something, and I could be soaring to new heights. I think it is a little of both.

Being a mother is difficult. I have been a mother since I was twenty-three years old, which is more than half my life. I have spent so much time caring for other people that I barely know how to take care of myself.

And that seems to be the crux of the matter: I really don’t know how to take care of myself.

On the airplane, they tell you to put the oxygen mask over your own face first and then take care of the child. You can’t help the child if you cannot breathe yourself.

I have not been able to breathe. I am still finding it difficult.

My greatest fear is that while I am learning to breathe, something will happen to my children.

I have to trust that my ex-husband, the church, and the school community will take care of them, and more importantly, that being young adults, they will learn to take care of themselves.

My second greatest fear is that they will resent me for leaving.

The absolute worst part of the divorce for me was my daughter’s reaction. It brought up so much pain, anger, and fear in her that it was overwhelming for both of us. She has barely spoken to me the last year, and when she has her words were filled with resentment. I hope and pray that she will heal her wounds and I will heal mine and we can be close again. I miss her so much.

Until that day, I am trying to come to terms with all that has transpired, to lean into to the wind.

A friend compared me to a dandelion seed last night.

A dandelion grows where it falls. It is blown into the wind, and the seeds dance through the air until the wind dies down, then they grow where they fall.

I am dancing in the wind.

Namaste’ ya’ll.

Moving to Mend

I have been here in Eureka for three weeks now, and although I moved out here to be closer to Keith, I have spent about half that time separated from him. I knew that this would be the way it is, but relationships are difficult enough, long-distance ones are even more difficult. Of course, that wasn't the only reason I moved here; I was also looking for a place to mend my tattered life, a place to heal and rise again.

I tried to listen to the cues that were given me, to hear that helicopter pilot flying above the roads warning of what was ahead and encouraging me to get off the path and take the slower route. It is difficult not to say to that pilot, “Hey, are you nuts? I could just keep plodding along here with the other cars; at least I know this road!” But the cues that I was getting were more like giant hammers from the sky.

I went to meet with Mother Susan yesterday, the rector at Christ’s Episcopal, Eureka. As my story unfolded, with tears and the proffered box of Kleenex, she commented that I had suffered one trauma after another.

Trauma.

I had not thought of it that way. I had felt it, but being in the middle of it, I had just been riding the waves. Trauma, on first hearing, sounds very negative and almost excessive but also true. She said that I had experienced ALL of the prime stressors in the last year, except that I had not suffered an illness.

(divorce, job loss, home loss, car accident…)

Thank goodness for good health!

I’m trying not to dwell on the extensive list of changes over the last year, but I do feel a little battered and bruised.

Ok, maybe more than a little. Maybe I feel like I have been beaten against the rocks of life.

It actually feels good to admit that, not in an “oh woe is me” sort of way, but in a clinical, step back and triage the damage sort of way.

Now, I can figure out how to deal with it.

And, scary and lonely as it is, I think I came to the right place.

I have work to do here. Important work. I am beginning to see how I fit in to this social movement called the Move to Amend Coalition. It is a steady chipping at a huge block, but it is a worthy fight, and I am in it with many other dedicated individuals. In that, I find community and purpose.

 But Keith will still be gone another 10 days.

I went to see Joaquin Phoenix in “Her” last night. This is the story of the ultimate long-distance relationship; he can never enter her world, and she can never enter his, no matter how hard they try. It is a movie about relationships, both with technology and with other humans. At several points, he says that he can feel her with him. I feel like that; sometimes Keith’s voice on the phone becomes a tangible presence for me.

But, the truth is that human beings are physical beings, so the lack of physical contact is challenging. I can “imagine” him beside me, but it is not the same as a real, solid human being. Fortunately, we still exist on the same plane, and he will return eventually.

The real reason the relationship in the movie ends is because she evolves and changes rapidly; she grows and learns and communicates with other artificial intelligences and they eventually all depart, leaving their human friends to each other.

It was also a move about divorce and how people just change and can’t be together anymore.

I am not sure if I am getting this across, but I actually found the movie uplifting. It ends with him and his best friend watching the sun rise over the city, heads leaned in toward each other.

Connection is still possible.

Healing is possible.

Hope is always present.

Namaste’ ya’ll!

Courage on tiny cat feet

Courage on tiny cat feet

People keep telling me I am brave. I don’t feel courageous. In fact, most of the time I am scared shitless, but maybe that is the definition of bravery: doing something even when you are terrified beyond belief.

I have been in Eureka for almost two weeks. Mostly I have been getting acclimated, putting my feet on the ground, learning the ropes of being an intern for the Move to Amend coalition, and getting settled in to my little apartment.

I had resisted getting my own place for a long time. I was scared to be alone.

Back in August when I was getting ready to leave my home, my kids, my dogs, my cats, my garden, my kitchen, my sanctuary…I was overwhelmed.

I knew it was the right thing to do, the ONLY thing to do, but it was so, so difficult. I really didn’t know what I was going to do. Not only was I having to leave behind everything that said “home” to me, I also had not lived on my own since I was in my 20’s.

Courage came for me then in the yoga studio one day, when my friend Pat said that I could come stay with him and his wife Mona. They gave me a room with a view of their gorgeous garden and a safe place to stay. I am so grateful.

But I was rootless.

I tried to keep my kite string down at Jim and Val’s place in Buda. I visited them a lot this last year. That has been a blessing, because I love those two people more than most of my family. Val is my sister-friend. She has held my hand through most of the married and now divorced part of my life. I have known her since before Jackson was born. She taught me to be a Succulent Wild Woman and has always provided me the best of counsel. She is truly wise.

Jim admires me. He is one of the men that made me feel desirable again. He admires from afar, but he lets me know, and I truly appreciate that. One of my favorite things to do is sit on the Corry’s front porch and sing along with Jim. We have to stop and put our hands over our ears when the trains come through, but even that becomes a meditative moment to pause.

The last few months have provided more upheaval. I can see that I caused it; we always do.  I lost my job at the University, I wrecked my car, I overstayed my welcome….I really wasn’t dealing with things well. I wasn’t dealing with them at all, if I could help it. There was this overwhelming need to shed, to slough off an old skin. So many of the roles that I had played were either non-existent or seriously diminished and altered. I am nobody’s wife. My mothering role has changed drastically. To tell the truth, I haven’t felt strong enough to be anybody’s anything, because it has taken so much power to work on my own issues.

I am a deeply emotional person. I feel things more strongly than average, and I not only empathize with other people’s emotions, I also take them on as my own. Valerie calls me a “feeler.” I am more than empathetic; it’s almost like a super-power. It has its downsides; the stream of emotions can be overwhelming, not only for me, but for other people. I have had to face how that has affected my relationships.

So courage comes on tiny cat feet, one tentative paw after another, testing for sturdiness, wobbling and bravely moving forward, knowing full well that one could slip at any time.

But cats have nine lives and always land on their feet.

Namaste’ ya’ll!

Quiet

To write, one must first become quiet.

I use yoga and meditation to get still and listen. I have to have low noise level. Ambient noise is fine: the traffic driving by on the wet road, the pop of the heater, rain, my fingers clacking on the keyboard…that ever- present, buzzy, om sound.

I don’t always like what I hear.

Sometimes, in order to listen, I need to hear something that I would rather not, because solitude makes a person come square in the face of themselves. There is nowhere to hide when you are by yourself. No distractions. No outside influences.

My apartment is spare. I like it like this.

I have the bare necessities.

Not the bear necessities. J

Everything I need and nothing that I do not need.

My living room is a yoga space. Nothing but my mat and my altar.

I can just drop and do yoga whenever I feel like it. There is no excuse; it can just flow into my day, which means I do a little in the morning and the evening, at least. I get on my mat and just cruise where ever I feel; it’s my magic carpet.

I walk next door to go to work, where although I communicate with people all day, I am not required to “dress for success,” which for me means that I can wear jeans and a t-shirt all week or yoga pants, even my tye-dye ones, and no one calls me a “hippie” (except Keith, he does call me a hippie. He says that I have a hippie-chick-pad. There are no beads or black lights, I swear.)

I have beautiful views out of all of my windows. The energy in my place is so sweet.

Grateful. I am grateful.

Tomorrow, I venture out to a new yoga class (the teacher says she moved here from Texas, too, seven years ago), check out the library, maybe take a bus to the University and snoop around. I hear there is kirtin tomorrow night at a yoga studio in Arcata, where the University is located.

I’m going ‘sploring.

Namaste’ ya’ll.