grief
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The blog of missing: Day 23
Today’s a bit of ok. I’m gliding on the surface, not dwelling on what freaks me out. I’m dwelling instead on this:
“Beneath the garments of the world is joy.
A miracle is a gift of light, not a gift of worldly goodies. It shines through the world I see. Each new crack in the scenery tells me there is something else going on behind this play I think I’m in.”
–Hugh Prather, Spiritual Notes to Myself
Beneath the garments of the world. Huh.
I find that incredibly moving.
I was reading back over my journal from the past year, and this date last year I was grieving over the rift in Jake’s and my relationship. Here, incredibly, is what I wrote that holds true right this second, if I could just remember it:
“Here is what I know:
I am not in control here.
He’s God’s, not mine.
I can trust that whatever happens, I will be ok, and so will Jake.
I don’t know where the wind blows. I know tiny human things.”
What finally gave me peace: Matthew 9: 16-17.
Our old relationship could not work. We must be transformed in God’s image.
Last year at a Mother’s Day banquet, a speaker said, “We mothers get in the way because we don’t let go.”
I’m sick with worry for legitimate reasons, yet I recognize he must find his own path without me.
I do not like this place I’m in, Sam I am.
Last year for Mother’s Day, Jake dropped off flowers when I wasn’t home. He told Tom, “Give these to your wife.”
I did laugh. I was delighted to be remembered. He came by! Scowling and sullen, but present, if only for a wee moment.
And when he apologized for the past two and a half years, he just kept bringing me flowers. I’d already forgiven him.
Eventually he got it, I think. I don’t know. I hope so.
More than ever I understand that the past doesn’t matter. Only right now matters. I am in the perfect place. I can’t be anywhere else. I ache with mother empties. I don’t know what’s wrong with my son. But.
Everything’s led here, and if I truly believe God has this, then all is well even in the tumult.
Blog of Missing: Day 22
When I wrote my memoir, I prefaced it with a story called Babes in the Wood, a story about two tiny children who were left by ruffians out in the woods to die. I learned to read on this story and others like it; my mother was big on folk tales. The abandonment resonated in me because my mother and her sisters had put 5 of us children into foster care. I’ve thought of the story as a harbinger that my mother unconsciously used to warn me of the dangers I would face, and lately I’ve been revisiting this from the standpoint of a mom.
I have been reading a book on Gestalt psychology, and I am struck by the idea of transactional analysis. I don’t know if I created a steadfast narrative of how life is when I was a child, and I don’t know how much weight I will give this theory. But I think it’s interesting that my earliest memory of reading is of a book about abandonment. And now I wonder what my sons’ narratives are, and how I contributed to them.
I’ve fought all their lives to break the chains of abandonment in our family story. Is Jake’s wandering in the figurative wilderness part of our family narrative?
I’m also reading books about baseball and I’m pretty sure that baseball is saving my sanity.
I went to my very first major league baseball game in April, when the Padres played the Cardinals. Tom, my husband, answered every one of my baffled questions with patience and delight. (I’ve never been interested in baseball, and was only there because I knew how much he would love it. It was the Cards, after all.) I asked about acronyms and stats and weird rules. (Dude. The infield fly?)
It was the infield fly that got me. It sounded like a bizarre rule, and it reminded me of English and how wretched its rules can be. English delights me, so of course baseball would, too. I have to know everything. So: books. heh
So now I’m on a search for my favorite player. Tom wants to get me a jersey, which I have never been remotely attracted to before and now must have. I’m leaning toward Molina, the Cardinals’ catcher. (Has to be Cards; I’m married to a St. Louis guy.)
The stats are my favorite, which is hilarious. Stats=math, and I am accustomed to giving it the stink eye.
So the obsession is engaging a different part of my brain and it helps me not to wallow in grief and fear. I confess, too, that it makes me laugh a little to think of the line, “How ’bout them Dodgers?”
The blog of missing: Day 21
I feel a certain tenderness toward people who witness when grief visits me unexpectedly. Grief is a rude fellow, with no appreciation for proper timing; he gives no figs about propriety in any circumstance that I’ve noticed.
Mostly people look like they feel cornered.
One guy asked about the situation and the minute he heard the catch in my voice he put his hand up and said, “No, no. You don’t have to explain.” Sheer panic in his voice. It’s ridiculously endearing. I don’t know, maybe it should annoy me that I can’t express myself to people, but it really doesn’t. This isn’t about me. It’s about my son.
Tonight I heard that Jake was seen by a woman who visited the Circle K in Imperial. Apparently he (or someone who looks like him) asked to use her phone. She refused, which I understand. Jake’s big, and he may look scruffy.
I’ve come to terms with the fact that she didn’t call the police when she learned he was a reported missing person.
If you’re not directly affected by things like this, it may not really strike you as necessary. You don’t know the anguish. None of us do unless we’re in it. Grace!
I am only able to be in this place because of my husband. He said, “Honey, we don’t know that this was Jake. You have to be prepared for a roller coaster till we find Jake.”
Actually: much longer conversation than that. I was a basket case. I’m getting better at truncation, eh.
So today I was helped by two angels in disguise: both passed out flyers and their paths intersected while they were helping me. Just regular people who give a damn. This is why I have hope. Love will find a way.
ps: I’m on an Amy Grant kick 😛
NaNoWriMo Rebellious Matter
…a tiny preview to those who’ve read my rough draft–here’s how I’ve begun revising my memoir. It’s rough, but I like the tone.
What I’d like to give my readers is hope—the kind that sneaks up on you when you’re doing the dishes or taking the kids to school or petting your cat: it shimmers in your chest for a moment and suddenly you realize that you’re going to be okay. That’s how it happened for me.
I was driving home from a therapy appointment in 1995, belting out Comfortably Numb when I had to pull over because I had a sensory flashback of the night my father took my virginity while I was sleeping. Out of nowhere, my vagina’s on fire.
I park by the side of the road, music off now, and I’m trying not to hyperventilate while I do a panicky, improvised Lamaze breathing–because, hell, that’s how you treat pain down there, right?
But my lips start tingling, so I shut off the car and get out.The heat hits me like the backdraft of a bomb, and I forget about the pain in my crotch. The pavement cooks my feet through the soles of my sandals as I hurry to the grass beyond the sidewalk.
Off with my shoes, and I’m standing barefoot in the skinny shade of a palm tree, and another more recent memory sweeps in. My sons, playing naked in the slimy thick mud in the front yard. Their bodies caked and splattered, hair spiky with it. Happy. Me, too, watching them, then, and now. Happy.Another feeling, one I can’t identify, is in my chest and it hurts a little. At first I think it’s sadness, which would make sense, given that I’ve just pulled over to quell a horrible memory. But no, I’m feeling something good, and the closest I can get to naming it is contentment.
Today, 16+ years later, I have a different name for it: hope.
That was when I saw that now is more powerful than the past.
Now is my gift. It’s mine, every tiny second of it.The flashbacks are like rips in time’s fabric: sometimes I slip through. But the beauty lies in the weave: I never fall without being able to grab the threads of now.
D5 Creation