oh this is hard

Belonging

Maggie pointed out this weekend that belonging “has longing, sewn in stoutly so you can feel it like Braille letters.”  Somehow I’d never noticed this before, and reading that simple sentence took my breath away.

Oh, how I long to belong.  The longing for that is, to use Maggie’s beautiful words, sewn stoutly in me.  I’ve written before about how complex the notion of home is, for me, who had a peripatetic childhood where moves were the only sure thing.  No matter where I’ve gone in my life – schools, geographies, jobs, communities – I’ve been followed by a sense of not really belonging, like a cloud above me, between me and the sun.  My whole life exists in its shadow.

I’ve sometimes tried to fit in, to blend into the background of a group.  Because I’m such a permeable person and so sensitive to what’s going on, it’s relatively easy for me to understand what others want from me.  The path of least resistance has usually been to reflect back whatever it is I sense someone wants to hear or see.  That’s led to a frequent sensation of being in a group but not really there, a feeling of floating over my own life, observing rather than participating.  This is, I have realized, a lot lonelier than just being alone.

What I’m trying to puzzle out is why belonging is so important to me.  Why, still, do I need the validation of “belonging”?  What kind of deep-rooted human need is it, this desire to feel a part of something bigger than ourselves?  Of course, I routinely feel overwhelmed by the enormous universe and the ways in which I am connected to it, but somehow this isn’t the kind of belonging I crave.  Or, at least, not yet.  Perhaps I’m still too immature and too insecure to find the comfort I seek in that kind of unity.

The universe is providing me with ample reminders that I need to surrender to this persistent loneliness: I chose, after all, the professional route that was most likely to make me not belong anywhere – working part-time, staying at home part-time, trying to be at school pickup in Juicy sweats and also at work meetings in heels, sometimes at the same moment.  I believe my choice came out of a subconscious need to learn the rich lesson that exists in the friction between my two worlds, and, most of all, in my continued, dogged sense of not-belonging.

That’s a generous interpretation of my behavior.  There is another, less kind one: An innate restlessness of spirit keeps me from fully engaging in any one world, from fully embracing a single identity.  Why is it that I refuse to fully let go and surrender to one clearly-defined life? What am I afraid of?  If I skip around between worlds, never fully engaging in or identifying with one, do I hope to innoculate myself from this terrifying vulnerability of really being seen? It’s as though as long as I keep moving all the photos of me will be blurry; literally and figuratively, it will be hard for anyone to get a clear impression of me.

I think I lack a sense of belonging because I still have a basic discomfort in my own skin.  Maybe I am not wholly sure of where I fit because I am not entirely sure who I am yet. Maybe I have met so few native speakers because I am still fumbling around with my own language. I do like people, and I am lucky to have many friends; the fact remains, though, that there are very few with whom I feel truly at home.

All I know is that I long to belong.  I long to feel utterly at ease, to relax into true repose, to trust absolutely that I am seen clearly and loved for what is seen.  Oh, how I long for that.  I think we all do.

There is no reason to be afraid

Yesterday afternoon Grace asked me to play American Girl dolls with her.  I told her I couldn’t right that minute, but that we could before bed if she wanted to, though she’d have to forgo TV.  No problem, she enthused.  Later, as we were playing, she mentioned that most of her friends at school don’t play American Girl anymore, and I felt a surge of emotion – some combination of panic and sadness, the steamroller of this life roaring in my ears as it flies past.

“Hold back!  Stop!  I panic, unprepared for change, but it’s too late … I cannot gather back one moment, only marvel at what comes next.” -Louise Erdrich, The Blue Jay’s Dance

Blinking back tears, I helped Julie the American Girl brush her teeth, and then I brushed out her long blonde hair, watching Grace chatter to the toy dogs as she lined them up, kissing each goodnight.  God, I thought fiercely, I do not want this to be over.  Not now, not ever.  I am not ready.

Then Grace tucked her two dolls in and told them a bedtime story.  I sat cross-legged on the floor, leaning against her bed, listening to her tale.  A lion named Aslan (guess what she’s reading) was presiding over a brand-new land in which a girl and her parents were lost.  The parents were scared of the lion but the girl could understand him, so he spoke to the adults through the child.  “Your daughter is special,” the lion said.  Grace looked up and caught my eye, and I smiled at her.  “She can understand when animals speak.  There is no reason to be afraid.”

Grace trailed off, leaning to pull the orange blanket up over the two girls.  “Grace,” I spoke to the back of her head, her brown hair already drying from her bath, “If you could have any super power, would you choose being able to speak to animals?”  She sat back down right across from me, shaking her head firmly.  “No.  I would choose invisibility.”

“Really?  Why?”  I was surprised.

“Well,” she hesitated, glancing away from me.  “Well,” she looked at me again and took a breath, “Sometimes at school, when someone says something that makes me feel silly, or hurts my feelings, I wish I could be invisible.  Just disappear.”

My chest clenched up.  I wanted to hug her against me, to kiss away all of those hurt moments, and to say to her, as her fictional all-powerful lion had, there is no reason to be afraid.  As soon as that thought passed, I realized I wanted someone to tell me that, too.

The tenderness of pain itself

I didn’t have the best Easter I’ve ever had.  On Saturday afternoon I began feeling sick, a nausea that intermittently escalated and ebbed.  By 7 I was in bed with a fever, trying hard not to throw up.  Sunday I woke up feeling somewhat better, though I remained vaguely carsick all day long.  This made me short with the children and with Matt in the morning, barking at them when I felt frustrated, annoyed at myself that I could not avoid this behavior.  Everything felt frayed and difficult by 8:30 in the morning.

At church, ease floated down to rest on my shoulders.  Sitting there, in a place that has held so much of my history – my sister’s marriage, both Grace and Whit’s christenings (each, actually, on Easter weekend)  – I exhaled.  I sang the songs I know by heart, their lyrics rising from some deep, hidden reservoir of memory, from the years at St. Paul’s Girls’ School.  My eyes filled with tears as I remembered the three grandparents I have lost, particularly Nana, my maternal grandmother, who always cherished Easter above all holidays.  I sank deep into the familiar cadence of the prayers before communion.  I felt gladness enter my heart, and in its wake, gratitude.

But as soon as we left the church, into the almost startling brightness of the day, into the sudden full-bloom of spring, the grace I’d felt in the pew sloughed off and my agitation rose to the surface again.  I felt nauseous, I felt tired, I felt cranky.  We had a lovely egg hunt at my parents’ house, with both my godsister and her family and my cousin and her boyfriend.  And then we had a relaxed, comfortable lunch at our house, my father and mother full of fascinating stories and observations from the trip to Jerusalem from which they just returned yesterday.

The day was nothing short of delightful, with only a couple of whiny kid moments to mar its gleam.  And I felt the person – the mother, wife, daughter – I want to be floating in the room, sometimes within reach, sometimes not.  The presence and peace that I grasp for so clumsily was just in my palm and then jerked away again, replaced by an unease of the soul that manifests as physical discomfort.

After lunch my nausea rose up in my throat again, threatening, and I climbed back into bed.  I felt demoralized, frustrated: after so many years, after so much trying, how can I still stumble, fall back into these traps, these old ways of being?  Didn’t I just write, a few days ago, that the black emotions can blow through, like a squall, and still leave me with the memory of a beautiful day?  I know what this agitation is about, I think: it is hiding, it is refusing to stare into the sun.  It is my attempt to evade the pain that is an inextricable part of truly engaging in my life.

But oh, what irony there is in this, I see now.  The pain I feel in knowing how much I’ve missed, in realizing how much these avoidance behaviors have cost me is so much keener than the pain of looking my life in the eye.  I know this as well as I know my own name.  Many days now, like last week, I can acknowledge the irritation that comes as regularly as a tide, and let it pass.  On Easter I could not: I got tangled in it.

“Healing,” Pema Chodron reminds us, “can be found in the tenderness of pain itself.” I read this last Easter, on Katrina Kenison’s gorgeous blog, and the words returned to me today.  The pain of living my life, of accepting the passage of time, of embracing my own wounded heart: these are the kinds of pain that Pema speaks of.  The awful, toxic pain of regret, however, carries no tenderness.  There is no healing in avoidance, in the way I felt for big swaths of Easter Sunday.

What is Easter if not the day of renewal, rebirth, resurrection?  Yes, I squandered a lot of it being crabby and irritable and short-tempered.  Yes, I drove myself to sobs alone in my room thinking: I will never have another Easter egg hunt when Grace is 8 and Whit is 6.  I don’t know exactly why I felt this way on Easter, a day I’ve always loved deeply.  I know that instead of attacking myself for this waste, lying in the dark, crying, as my stomach roiled as though I’m at sea in a storm, I should instead embrace what Easter means, believe in the return of my peace.  I am trying.

Not having enough

When I ran cross-country, in high school, I’d invariably have so much energy at the end that I’d sprint the last half mile.  Or do a cartwheel or two towards the finish line.  My coach, understandably, was not enormously fond of this behavior, and urged me to run faster earlier on because I obviously could.  I never did.  I was scared that I would be too tired at the end.

In yoga, I often drop out of poses a few breaths before the teacher says to.  I’m usually hurting by then, my body giving up the “alert! alert! alert!” flare, but I’m never at the point of actual failure.  For example, I’ve never held a back bend for a full ten breaths.  I have never not rested during some extra-long downward dogs.  I have never stayed in warrior two for a long hold, totally still.  It’s not exactly that I give up when things get hard.  It’s a little more nuanced, and less impressive than that: I give up before they are really hard, in anticipation of not being able to do it.

The personality trait evinced by these examples has been on my mind lately.  And it’s not a good one.  It’s as though I’m preemptively worried about not having enough – energy, strength, speed.  Even when the data suggests otherwise, I’m too afraid.  What, though, am I actually afraid of?  Am I scared of “success,” of running fast, of holding a pose longer than I thought I could?  What would happen if I did?

And, I worry, in how many non-physical ways does this tendency manifest?  I’m certain there are dozens of places – emotional, spiritual, intellectual – where I am similarly afraid to really go there.  How to break through this mild, sometimes invisible withholding?  What is it about?

I don’t have answers, but I have lots of questions, today centering around this aspect of myself that I am not proud of.  I should just try holding the damned backbend for ten breaths.  But for some reason that fills me with fear.  Why?

What do you prioritize and what do you let slip?

I love this post by Mom 101 about The Myth of Doing It All.  Yes, this is a topic we’ve all been over.  It is not new.  What I hadn’t thought about before, though, is what she shares, paraphrasing an essay by Tina Fey in the New Yorker:

When you ask a working mom about how she does it all, it either puts her in the position to say something disparaging about herself (check) or deliver an answer that makes the questioner feel somehow inadequate for doing less.

Honestly this sentence was a huge AHA.  I simply had never realized that this was why this question made me so uncomfortable.  And it does: my skin crawls and I launch into full-on shoulders-slumping, mumbling, deflecting mode as soon as someone asks me this.  The truth is none of us do it all.  Everybody makes choices and prioritizes.  The other truth is that no matter what the reality is of what our days look like, pretty much everybody I know experiences their lives as busy.  It’s what you do within that that speaks of what you prize: I think that you can look at how you spend the hours of your day as a map that reflects what you truly value.

I have a seemingly endless appetite for truthful conversations, like the one started at Mom 101, about the details of others’ personal juggles.  Everybody has their own tricks and their own private calculus about what can be de-prioritized.  I have shared some of my own “secrets” before, none of which are particularly insightful.

One of my key decisions is that it takes a lot to get me out of the house in the evening (here: an example of something I’ll go out for). I remember a few years ago at a dinner party explaining to the man on my right that when evaluating potential plans I measure everything against the other option of being home in bed reading. I could see the sheer horror on his face when I said this, and it deepened into something more like terror when I allowed that very few plans make it past this screen.  I often get criticized for being anti-social (especially by my husband, the E to my I) but I have chosen to protect the few hours that are mine.

What else do I let slip?  I never watch TV, so I am woefully out of loop on a lot of conversations, blogs, and emails.  I let my children sleep until the last bitter moment in the morning, believing as I do in the supreme importance of sleep, and so they often eat breakfast in the car.  I do laundry in a – ahem – casual way, which is to say that I do not separate lights and darks.  I do not iron.  I cook simple food, and Grace and Whit are not, as a result, adventurous eaters.

Please chime in here – what are your strategies for juggling your life?  What do you prioritize and what do you let go of?