Staying and escaping, and staying while escaping.

Last week, a woman I’d never met before came to my house, full of curiosity and wonder and pain.  She was on a journey diving through other women’s stories, women who were mothers, women who were humbled and emboldened and exhausted and healing, and burning with truth.  She was there with me to learn something, to spark something, to heal something -- to create a platform for mothers to share and to connect through our collective courage and vulnerability.  

As I told her my story, of George and our love and my visions and his leaving, I was reminded.  I was reminded of the grief and the suffering, the resistance and the surrender.  I was reminded that there was a time when communities could come together to lift up the wounded.  I was reminded that once upon a time, I was terrified of being a single mother, and I longed for an escape, but I stayed.  I was reminded that there are many ways of escaping.  That we can force our physical form to remain in place while our minds wander and our hearts flee.  ​

When George left, I did not flee.  I dreamed of it, I fantasized.  I wondered what it would be to disappear.  But the urge to step into my becoming was greater than the urge to fold into darkness.  More than escaping, I wanted to experience.  I wanted to live.  I was curious about the process, the grief, the thing that was supposed to break me wide open and put me back together more wise and whole and beautiful.  I could see the totality of what I was dealing with -- Death -- even as the unknown lingered ahead, even as my voyage into motherhood was frightening and lonely.  George had died, and his absence was certain.  I knew what I was being asked to overcome.  The path ahead was trodden with the heartache and wisdom of those who had lost before me, and there was only one way through.  To feel.  To grieve.  To stay.  To accept.  To rebuild.

2020 was different.  It did not descend as suddenly, as shockingly, as the day that George departed, but rather fractionally.  Little by little, things were taken.  News was doled out.  Information trickled.  We did not know what we were dealing with -- a virus?  The lives of our elders?  Our childrens’ education?  Mental health?  Loss of income?  Overcrowded hospitals?  Death?  We did not have a barometer for the crisis, only that it seemed to keep getting worse, with no end in sight and no national strategy for persevering through the interim.  The thing we were being asked to overcome was unknown, untrodden, unimaginable.  It was unchartered territory, and we -- overcome by grief and fear -- had no blueprint to follow.  No signs pointing to the pain, telling us:  Here.  This is the way through.  It’s going to hurt, but you have to feel it to heal it.  

Often I’ve felt 2020 to be harder than the year George died.  When I say this, people are surprised, they ask me how anything could be harder than losing your love while carrying your unborn child.  The coronavirus, my mother’s stage 4 cancer diagnosis, closing my acupuncture practice, our home uninhabitable due to water for months on end -- surely even with all of that, losing George was harder?

What I was unable to see, until this angel of a woman appeared on my doorstep last week, is that yes, 2020 was (is) harder, but the reason why it was harder has nothing to do with my list of grievances.  It was harder because I failed to honor it as an experience that needed to be lived -- as the thing that will break you open and put you back together more wise and whole and beautiful.  It was harder because instead of feeling, I fled.  My daily consumption of social media, online shopping, alcohol and Netflix formed an escape route that led me farther from myself and the truth than I have been in over a decade.  I stopped writing, I stopped learning, I stopped dreaming.  I did not stay.  I surrendered everything.

The first step back to your Self always begins with that first realization -- not that something is wrong, but that something has escaped.  Showing up to cook, clean, drive, wash, shop, teach and parent will never be enough if our hearts and minds have flown the nest.  While I spin in vacuous circles around my daughter, she is growing, changing, becoming -- and I am missing.  I do not want to be missing.  I am exhausted from the spinning. 

Thank you, Mia Gorrell, for asking about my story.  Thank you for reminding me what it means to do hard things, to live through hard times without searching for the exit, for helping me find my way back.  Thank you for honoring women and mothers of all roads and colors, and for showing us how vulnerability is done.  

Find Mia’s heart-opening stories and writings at https://tanglesofamother.com/.