Here in the warm, fertile South, things grow. Our county fairs are famous for tomatoes, pumpkins, and melons of mammoth proportions. My grandma’s house in the Florida panhandle sported a sleeping porch that was all but taken over by philodendron vines that crept and spread, covering each wall. One night spent out there beneath the green ceiling and your subconscious would swim with humid jungle scenery, spurred by the nocturnal buzz and chirp of frogs and cicadas.
You’d think, surrounded by such constant, urgent growth, I’d be more attuned to change, that it would be less of a personal affront. And yet.
A few years ago, in the space of a few months, my oldest got married and moved out of state, my youngest launched and started college, my husband and I sold the business we’d run for 20+ years, we turned 50, and my elderly father moved nearby. Shortly after the dust settled, we found ourselves slow blinking at each other over coffee one morning. We’d reached our day of reckoning.
It’s been a solid two years of what I call The Great Unraveling.
When my son was young, he’d wake up in the night complaining that his legs ached. For weeks, he’d limp around the house, gingerly favoring this knee or that ankle. Growing pains, the pediatrician told us, and I’d laughed.
“Wait. That’s actually a thing?”
“Yep,” he’d assured me. “It’ll eventually stop. His insides are just stretching to keep up with his outsides.”
Sure enough, his pant size finally leveled out and I quit doling out a fortune for hardly worn jeans. He stopped at 6’2″, and it still startles me every time I have to crane my neck to look in the eyes of the young man I used to walk hand-in-hand with across parking lots.
In the Great Unraveling, it felt like that. Achy and unstable. We’d done too much all at once and our insides were not keeping up with the outside. All of it was what we’d worked toward and hoped for, yet we were as disoriented as if we’d leapt from a whirling merry-go-round, staggering around like drunks with arms akimbo. And, for the love, where were all these tears coming from, spilling forth unbidden from some infinite inner spring?
Lou Holtz, the Notre Dame football coach, is credited with saying if you’re not growing, you’re dying. Well, Lou, sometimes growing feels like you’re dying. Moving away from what’s known and comfortable to uncharted and untamed territory can trigger staggering grief. Even the ancient cartographers knew: there be dragons.
A curious emotional cauldron bubbled within, a witch’s brew of joy and excitement for my kids’ futures, and a deep and marrow-filling sorrow at their departure. The same was true for my own self: eager anticipation for how my marriage might deepen and grow, given the extra hours we’d have now that it was just us again, paired with the struggle of renegotiating roles, schedules, and what a given day might look like now that we shared the same work space, absent of children.
What was next for me? Now that my days were untethered from my kids’ schedules and needs, now that our professional and financial lives looked different, what might I discover, pursue, try? Quite a bit, it turns out. I wrote a novel, began a second, started mentoring younger families with kids and hosting a thriving group of newly married couples. I had plenty of time to read, write, think, and connect with others. I found lots more time for the garden, creativity, and plain old leisure, which I’d almost forgotten about.
Undertakings, you might call them, all these new activities. It’s a curious word since an undertaker is typically one who deals with the dead. I suppose that’s who I’d become, in this new space, mourning what had passed, offering comfort to who and what remained, and ushering in what was to come next.
“What’ve you been up to, mom?” I imagined my children asking.
“I’ve become an undertaker.”
“Okaayy. Is dad home?”
The only one who likes change is a wet baby, Mark Twain famously said. That’s true, while it’s happening. It’s on the other side of change where we find ourselves marveling at why it took us so long to get here in the first place. Who knew we’d love sushi? Or enjoy taking walks with a friend? Or actually settle into not having to know what the kids were doing or who they were with and could trust them to get the oil changed and get a haircut? Because they were changing, too, growing madly into new versions of themselves and shucking their childish skins like a heavy coat on a warm day.
I never would have thought, at first, that I’d be savoring this new, delicious way of being and discovering, just the way I’d relished the loud and busy days of before. Maybe it was the cynic or pessimist in me who’d questioned whether anything could match what we already had, who kept posing the question “what now?” in an irritable, can’t-be-bothered tone instead of an eager “what’s next?”
It occurred to me that just as the pediatrician used to mark my kids’ milestones and percentiles, I might measure my own growth this way. What can I do this year that I couldn’t six months ago? Am I trying something new? Conquering fear to take a brave risk? Bursting into tears less often? Baby steps.
Somewhere along the way, babies quit opening their mouths like trusting little birds when we aim the spoon their direction. They develop suspicion and guard against what they’ve learned might be yucky or what could be good but what’s probably strained peas. They turn their heads with clamped lips and refuse to try.
For a good part of the Great Unraveling, I turned my head and refused. I wasn’t about to get a mouthful of peas when what I wanted, what I yearned for was pears and ice cream. I was, in other words, a big baby. I pouted, sulked, withdrew, and cried. I moped, slouched, sighed, and frowned.
All the emotional turbines churned, and maybe there’s a place for that. Maybe we have to sit with that a minute (or a week or month or more) and bear witness to all the feelings that arise with gravity-shifting change. I observed all the big emotions as they unwound themselves and noticed them gently. I didn’t accuse, belittle, or dismiss any of them. Being unspooled is a vulnerable place to be, and vulnerability needs to be met with kindness, above all. Fellow travelers in the same boat are excellent companions for this, by the way.
But the unspooling leaves you with work to be done. It leaves you with a heap that must be rewound and reworked into something new. Made of some of the same material, no doubt, and colored with what came before, but an entirely different creation. Not pears and ice cream, but not exactly strained peas either.
Crossing these thresholds of the “what was” and “what’s next” requires some of the toughest growth there is. Our limbs and hearts ache with it as we resist, or at best, struggle to keep up. Liminal spaces like these are sacred, holy ground. They are where the unraveling occurs and where we discover what anchors us, what tethers remain, and what we’re capable of, still. The author and theologian Richard Rohr, warns us, despite the pain and discomfort, to find these sorts of spaces regularly. Actually seek them out on purpose. He urges us to “get there often and stay as long as you can by whatever means possible” because if we don’t find such thresholds in our lives, “we start idolizing normalcy.”
And, boy, if 2020 taught me anything, it was how much I was infatuated with normalcy. How, in the end, we’re all pretty much avoiding the peas and stomping our feet about the ice cream we’d expected.
I think perhaps, for me, this particular Great Unraveling is nearing an end, for now. As I spend time with my aging father, I can easily see others on the horizon, and I resolve to approach them with less resistance and more purpose next time around. The decades unfold and the only constant is, of course, change. We help one another over the thresholds, saying watch your step and, with a sweep of the arms, welcome, welcome.
“I am a writer.” I said that out loud to a stranger earlier this year and immediately glanced around to see if the store’s security was hurrying forward. I must have been blushing because I felt my face get hot and my stomach somersaulting–kind of like being twitter-pated in the springtime. (It’s a Bambi reference. Go back and review your Disney films.)
I felt like any second my subterfuge would be discovered. It wasn’t like I’d claimed to be a 300 lb black woman, a fraud people could instantly detect. Anybody can raise a hand to be counted as a writer and no one would ever know the truth. I was buying a ceramic octopus, intended to sit on my desk as inspiration for a YA story I was working on. The lady in line behind me asked what it was for, and before I could shrug it off as a silly knick-knack, the words just slipped out and there it was: now the universe knew.
I hadn’t really written since college, when I had deadlines to churn out short stories, screenplays, and for a while some truly awful poetry. Before that, since I can remember, I dreamed up tales for fun and was always in favor of essay tests instead of multiple choice in school. When the real world of work, family, and responsibilities closed in, I pushed writing to the back of the closet, pulling it out now and then to write silly Christmas poems for friends or edit other people’s writing.
All this was fine, I told myself, because you’re not a writer. Instead, I read constantly. Digesting a steady diet of words, craft, and imagery, whether I knew it or not, kept me tethered to possibility. Daily, the crowd of impish meanies in my head scoffed rudely and produced lists of reasons why I could not and should not try this at home. It doesn’t count if once upon a time your mama said you were good. If you dare crack open that door, you will be like the pathetic American Idol contestant who can’t carry a tune in a bucket but who imagines they are Barbra Streisand. A clown. A hack. A public joke. So fear got to be the boss of me and I reasoned that the world had plenty of amazing writers already. Exhibit A: my overflowing bookshelves.
Plus, I was too busy. A small business and growing family left no time for indulgences. I had “nothing to say.” Then my oldest left for college. I’m sure there’s an entire psychological avalanche of reasons why, but suddenly the excuses petered out. Now a couple of decades older, I had had experiences that perhaps did give me something to say. I no longer cared about the impish meanies. Why had I listened to their chorus in the first place?
So I started pecking out blog pieces, personal essays mostly, bits about my crazy family. There was no snickering, rotten tomatoes, or death threats. Turns out when you hit “publish” and your message in a bottle drifts on the universe’s currents, no one much sees it. Then I wrote a chapter based on an idea I had and made my teenage son listen to it. Every few days, I’d do another installment, our evening miniseries. Two more ideas later, I have another YA novel (the octopus) and a supernatural thriller in the works.
Each small step has led further down the path to connections, exposure and bravery. Lots and lots of bravery. It dawned on my that I preached to my kids about taking risks and pursuing their interests while I sat like a mouse huddled in a corner with what really mattered. My oldest went sky diving this year. Sitting at a keyboard and turning yourself inside-out across a page can be kind of like that. Every fiber screams that this is a really dumb idea and you should just back out, but then you hit publish and you’re airborne, sucking wind and trying not to die.
But the parachute! Once that sucker opens and you’re not hurtling towards earth, it’s kind of cool up there. The view is fantastic. Your fellow jumpers are all giving you the thumbs up with goofy grins plastered across their faces. Floating like that releases a feeling of freedom and rush of endorphin because you know you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to be doing.
The community I’ve discovered on Twitter and Medium, the blog followers and Facebook commenters are the lift that enables flight. Julie Valerie’s monthly blog hop has been both a motivator and an inspiration. So many resources are available today that weren’t when I was literally typing out drafts on a manual typewriter all those years ago. In this next year, I plan to participate for the first time in NaNoWriMo to force me to complete one of the half-drafts filed on my desk. I will continue to submit beyond the blog to other outlets and contests. Next fall, because I plan to guard my work time more jealously, I will enter PitchWars. Because, curse you, impish meanies: Why Not?!
And because, like I told the octopus lady in the store, I’m a writer.
My oldest went sky diving a few weeks ago. She took off with a group of friends and jumped out of a perfectly good plane while, 2 hours away, her dad and I checked our phones nervously for news of a safe landing.
This is par for the parenting game. About three seconds after I became a parent, every cell in my being zeroed in on the safety of that little bundle. And about three seconds after that, my kids seemed to delight in finding new ways to hurt themselves.
I did all the right stuff–electrical outlet covers, car seats, a lock on the chemicals under the sink, talks about strangers, the internet, drugs and alcohol, driving skills, and safe sex. Still, they found ways to get broken arms, ding the car, and make asinine choices. From their first steps (right into the edge of the coffee table) to the scraped elbows from the epic wreck on the bicycle, 90% of parenting felt like I was chasing them around with bubble wrap, which they’d fling off and set fire to.
I put my 3-month-old down for a nap once, grabbed the baby monitor and went to our unfinished upstairs to paint some window frames. My husband came home for lunch that day, poked his head up to say hello, then left a short time later. When I heard the baby stirring on the monitor, I headed down to get her and discovered he’d locked the door, which was always our habit. I was trapped, the baby out of reach with no one around, no phone.
Panic! I calculated how many bones would break if I jumped out the second story window. Tried throwing myself into the door to break it down. (It doesn’t work like it does in the movies.) Everyone else in the cul de sac was at work, except… A solitary teen aged boy was playing basketball several doors down. I screamed at him, hanging out the window and waving my arms like an insane person until he came over, let himself into my house, and freed me from my prison. (Clearly, his parents had not taught him about Stranger Danger.)
This same child locked herself in her room as a toddler, and I sat on the other side of the door, our fingers touching underneath, frantically fumbling with the skeleton key. There is nothing so agonizing to a parent as being helpless to reach a child who needs you.
Ask any parent of a chronically ill child, watching as they’re wheeled to yet another procedure. Or the parents denied access to their adopted child month after month while foreign governments sift through red tape. Divorced parents who share custody with an irresponsible or abusive ex. Parents of deployed soldiers. It’s all part of the package, except, eager to reproduce, none of us ever reads the fine print.
A friend who recently dropped off her kid at college lamented to me that she couldn’t stop worrying about something happening and not being able to get to her daughter. I get it. My own is scheduled to study abroad next semester and I’ll admit to feeling similar twinges, especially after Paris, Brussels, and Nice hit the news cycle. But that’s fear talking. And fear is not the Boss of me. “Love is what we’re born with,” says Marianne Williamson. “Fear is what we learn here.”
Parenting is nothing if not risk. From the time they’re born, we perform a kind of catch and release with our hearts. It’s a tight-wire balancing act: keep them close, send them out; swoop in to rescue, let them learn to fall. The end goal is, after all, to work ourselves out of a job.
https://youtu.be/he3zaola7YE
Full disclosure: I grew up in the 70’s and 80’s when we rode our bikes miles from home (sans helmets) and drank straight from the garden hose The surgeon general was barely even a thing. I’m in favor of running barefoot, grabbing mane on a galloping horse, climbing trees, and “Swing higher, Daddy!”
Yes, there are moments of panic and anguish as a parent, times when you can’t protect your child or prevent every misstep. Did we really believe it would all be giggles and lollipops? We can’t fetishize safety because of a world that feeds off fear like it’s sugar. When did failure became the new F-word? Failure is the only way forward.
The flip-side of risk is where the good stuff hides out. The flip side of risk is connection, creativity, a life with flourish. Sometime, we have to let go of the back of the bike and quit running along behind. I’m too old for that noise, for one thing. And parenting was never supposed to be about my fear–it’s about their launch.
Recently, I ran across a video of children discovering their shadows for the first time. Their reactions range from fascination to uncertainty to outright fear. Imagine! Here you are minding your business on a bright, sunny day and suddenly a dark figure appears who (the audacity!) mimics your every move.
Once we grasp that our shadows aren’t out to get us, and assuming they’re not the rascally runaways like the shadow of the unfortunate Peter Pan, we learn how to manipulate them. A tree outside my childhood bedroom cast long shadows on the wall in the evenings. I’d form my hands into shadow puppets of birds, which flew about its branches, landing and taking off with dramatic flutters. A talented friend of ours made comical bunnies, menacing wolves, and cunning crocs come alive with just his hands and a spotlight.
A shadow is, after all, just a projection made from light. This mind-bending photo by George Steinmetz shows an overhead image of shadows cast by a caravan of camels trekking across the desert sands. What earned this picture its status as one of 2005’s best photos of the year (National Geographic) is that if you look closely, you see the camels are actually the thin white lines. The dark recognizable camel shapes are all camel shadows. Whaaat?! Go ahead, enlarge it and see.
The light, directed just so, projects an image that creates a much greater impression than the object itself. Perspective is slippery. Had this photo been captured at a different time of day, the camel shadows would have instead been long wavy lines trailing behind the caravan. Nothing special. When the light is strongest and at its best for creating projections, it changes what we see of ourselves; it changes how we are seen by others.
The shadows we cast change over time, or maybe it’s that time changes the shadows we cast. In the morning of life, when we are unsure and unsteady, the strength of our shadow may frighten us, like the children in the video, and send us scurrying back into the comfort of shade. Later, conditioned by rejection, loss, or a shaky belief in who we are or what we can be, it’s much easier to stand in someone else’s shadow rather than risk casting our own. We don’t trust what the light might reveal, or perhaps we have our own idea what might be projected and we fear it’s more like a misshapen weasel than a swan.
Once upon a time, we might have been a child on a rocking horse or a wobbly duckling running for cover. A few along the way, parents, treasured teachers, a best friend, see us for who we are meant to be, who know what treasures lie within. They see us from above in the afternoon, and to them the rocking horse seems a galloping stallion, the duckling a darting hummingbird.
One day, we grow tall enough and brave enough to stride into the day with confidence, casting our own shadows boldly and realize what we have been all along. Armed with grace, we see what our own two hands are capable of shaping onto the wall, when we let the light in.
Now, well into my fourth decade, I feel more comfortable in my own skin than at any other time I can remember. It feels good to stretch my muscles in the sunlight, and I find myself lingering to soak up its warmth. I’m more curious than afraid of what images its rays will scatter.
We, as a matter of course, extend this powerful light-wielding vision to our children, family, friends, and even strangers. Why is it we so often withhold it from ourselves and keep our shadow casting small and timid? Standing in the shade, we throw no shadow at all. Our canvases are empty. Afraid to be just ducklings, we never see the hummingbird’s gossamer wings flickering in the sun.
The truth is we are all a bit of both: ducklings and hummingbirds, camels and thin white lines. Each comes from the other; each is lovely and full of light. Don’t wait for permission, perfection, or “the right time.” Cast your shadow, big and bold.
Back in another life, I flew without wings. All my free time was on the back of a horse, aiming toward ditches, brush piles, or neatly stacked poles, and cantering forward until hooves parted with earth and we sailed upward, buoyant for brief glorious moments.
Most of the time, this is not a point-and-shoot exercise. On TV it looks like the rider balances primly with her shiny boots in the stirrups while the horse bounds around the ring or through the field like a lamb, vaulting obstacles in a neat line. Inside the rider’s head, it’s a different story.
It’s all about timing, the length of a horse’s canter stride and how many of those 3-beat strides fill the space between one jump and the next. If it’s a tricky distance, you might go faster or slower to shorten or lengthen the stride. Just as you’re taking off, you shift your weight forward and slide your hands up his neck a bit, loosening the rein so you’re not jabbing him in the mouth as he stretches over the jump. Would a horse naturally do this on his own? Generally, no, not even to escape an enclosed pasture. Horses are by nature fairly lazy and would much rather swish flies and graze in a sunny field all day.
On one sticky Florida afternoon, I navigated through a cross-country course with obstacles made from tree trunks and other “natural” barriers. My horse was a stocky palomino with a mid-section like a barrel. He had been a poky western pleasure mount before arriving at the farm in his reluctant new role as a hunter jumper, and his strides were clipped, his manner resentful, and his driving force was to avoid exertion and retire to the stall as soon as possible.
My calves ached from the constant “encouragement” this horse required to make it up and over each jump in the field. He’d obediently break into a misleading canter, only to pull up short just before the jump and pop over it grudgingly from a stand still, leaving an unprepared rider wobbling in the saddle. Despite knowing this, I let my guard down at the water jump. It was just a two foot ditch flanked by railroad ties, like hopping a crack in the sidewalk. He could have trotted over it easily, and in fact, that’s just what I expected him to do. Pridefully, I thought, this one was easy. We all know what proverbially follows pride.
Inches before the simple jump, he stopped dead, planting his hooves like a mule. His muscled hind end gathered up behind him like we’d just roped a calf and he was in full skid. I continued on without him. In what I like to imagine was a graceful somersault, I tumbled over his ears and down, cracking my ribs across the railroad ties before flipping backwards into the water.
Icarus, fallen.
I lay on my back in the mud, feeling like a bird must after it has flown full-force into a plate glass window. Submerged, I looked up through about three feet of water, my arms pinned against my throbbing ribs by the solid sides of the jump. Thankfully, I did not try to breathe. I could not even gasp, as all air had been forced from my lungs on impact. A muted sort of quiet surrounded me, like when you sit like a yogi on the bottom of a swimming pool, testing how long you can hold your breath. The blue, cloud studded sky rippled overhead and I saw my horse’s nose as he peeked over the edge, certainly not concerned for my well-being, but more to inquire if we were now, in fact, done for the day.
In short measure, my companions rushed over to hoist me, dripping and muddy, out of the ditch. Rule number one is get back in the saddle. Never end on a bad note. So, up I climbed, each breath ragged and painful, and we approached the jump again. He gauged from my black mood that he should not repeat his little trick and skipped over it this time like he was in a girlish game of hopscotch. Afterwards, I sullenly led my horse back to the barn, water squelching in my boots the whole way.
For a time, while my ribs healed, my wings were clipped. It was one of those formative childhood moments: invincibility is imaginary. While I preferred the air to earth’s tether, the air was risky; lying face-up in a mud hole was always a possibility.
It’s tempting to cling to the sure thing, the comfortable, in lieu of that risk. Sometimes we even prefer our own painful mud hole to climbing out to face what might be humiliation or vulnerable exposure. It’s quiet in there, and we’re kind of used to it. We tiptoe along, watching others achieve goals, be adventurous, learn a new skill, go on that first date after a lost relationship, craft their art.
The view from down in the ditch is less than inspiring. We placate ourselves, pointing out the blue sky and sunshine, but it’s a stifled view we’re used to, settling for a rippling opacity, void of fresh air and birdsong. We cannot be afraid of bruised ribs or bruised egos. Take a breather after the hard knocks, but bruising is only a reminder of what not to do the next time. Because there should be a next time! We are not meant to be ditch dwellers. We are meant to test our mettle, reach beyond our grasp, experience abundance and taste what it is to fly, even without wings.
