The Great Unraveling

Photo by frank mckenna on Unsplash

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 Knew You When

I Knew You When

If you’re lucky, despite your lack of merit or any earned grace, you may be fortunate enough a handful of times for a kindred spirit to come alongside you and walk a ways. Over three decades ago, due to the single-handed determination and strong will of her mother, one of those unlikely blessings knitted herself to me at the fragile and tenuous age of fifteen.

Today marks her fiftieth birthday. At the entrance to yet another decade we are lucky to face together,  it strikes me that one of the things that most binds us is that we knew each other when.  Should time clasp its stingy fingers around one of us, which inevitably it someday will, the other will remain to testify to our children. I knew her when.

What a different portrait we can paint than what our children know of us. To them, our moniker is simply “mom,” our presence a given in their universes. Everyone needs a person like this to keep them humble and grounded, to remind them of past innocence and the effort it took to get from there to here. She and I know each other differently, deeply, because we linked arms to weather puberty and periods, chemistry and college, self discovery and the social minefield of high school and beyond. We’d go out on the weekends with friends, me perched on the lid of the toilet while she did her hair and curled her eyelashes. There were braces and boys, angst, acne, and anxieties. Maybe our collective offspring would find it amusing to hear of our exploits, the episodic stories of our coming of age perhaps quaint or provincial to such sophisticated and worldly young adults of 2018. But maybe there’d be a little shock and awe thrown in for good measure at what we each have overcome.

One of my sisters dubbed her “four o’clock Michelle,” because every afternoon after school, our phone would ring and I’d tie up the line for a couple of hours as we downloaded the events of each day. Weekends, we swapped time at each other’s houses, our mothers in the background doing whatever it was mothers did. She taught me how to make excellent snicker doodle cookies, coached me through calculus and chemistry, and exponentially upped my ping pong game in her family’s basement.

Together, we were “not from around here,” having moved in to start high school from out of state–she from Ohio, me from Florida. We shared a lack of southern accents, lots of siblings, and a love of Abba. If that doesn’t say soul sister, I’m not sure what does. We danced to Bananarama and Madonna in the 80’s, were each other’s maids of honor in the 90’s, and compared experiences with marriage and raising children in the 00’s and beyond. I learned to two-step at her wedding when she married that boy from Texas, and, years later, it was her mom I turned to for parenting advice in the absence of my own mother.

Even twenty-five years after my mother’s funeral, she calls or texts on that anniversary to remember and say she’s thinking of me. I follow her parents’ and siblings’ lives, cheer for their successes, and worried over her dad’s recent heart issues. When I saw her standing with her family while we took pictures after my daughter’s wedding, my eyes stung as the emotions welled up. She’s always present for the stuff that matters.

Once, for a month, we were roommates on a college campus. Although we spent almost every moment together in regular life, we didn’t do so well as live-in roomies. Too much of a good thing. But the summer her family camped across the West for a month, I almost died from loneliness. It was before cell phones, and waiting four whole weeks for our reunion was the worst kind of torture. We got used to separation, attending different colleges, for instance, in different states. For years, I visited her in Chicago, Minneapolis, and Texas, while I stayed put with a family business in Tennessee.

For now, she’s only a short drive from here, and we’ve been able to visit more often, each time picking up where we left off, falling into real conversations and the ease and comfort of each other’s company. In construction circles, there’s a thing carpenters use to aid a weak or sagging joint. Apparently, the easiest way to repair a compromised joist is to attach another board of equal or larger size alongside. This board is called–wait for it—a sister board, and the process is known as “sistering.” How brilliant is that? It’s the perfect illustration for life-long friendship, for the person who steps in and holds you up when you’re sagging, who knows just where you need help and just where you’re strong. Who knew you when, knows you now, and loves you anyway. Happy 50th birthday, sister!  

Bridge

Bridge

Waiting in traffic on drawbridges was a fact of life for me as a kid.   Unaware of the adult time pressures of schedules and to-do lists, I’d sit in the back of the car watching the stately sailboats gliding like royalty through the raised roadway that halted our progress.   Stuck at a standstill, I could get a closer look at the pelicans perched on the watchman’s tower.  Once the drawbridge was lowered, I was amazed that we could drive right over a stretch of road that had just a second ago been pointing toward the sky.

Somewhere along the way, that leisurely contentment on bridges gave way to more nervous crossings.  I’ve driven over the Golden Gate and Brooklyn Bridges, clomped echoing steps over wooden covered bridges in New England and Madison County, Iowa, hiked across hanging suspension bridges on trails here and there, and cruised over the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers crossing over into neighboring states.  There were jaw-dropping views from the Bixby Bridge in Monterey, California, and white-knuckle moments across the Chesapeake Bay Bridge in Maryland.  (This bridge is so scary, some people actually pay $50 a day for a service to drive them to work and back!)

Mostly, bridge crossings have been uneventful, but not always.  Our car broke down in the middle of the 5-mile long Mackinac Island Bridge in Michigan.

Royal Gorge Bridge

Royal Gorge Bridge

I lost power steering and acceleration and had to coast the last part of the way off the far side.  In Colorado, I rode in the back seat hyperventilating as we crossed the Royal Gorge Bridge, the world’s highest suspension bridge, dangling 1,100 feet above the Arkansas River.  It was so narrow that passing cars had scant inches between them as they crawled along, and pedestrians walking across had to plaster themselves flat against the railings to avoid being run over.  Then there was that one time in a haunted house with my brother where I wet my pants when we crossed a wooden bridge rigged to fall out from under us.

People build bridges, after all–fallible people.  Maybe the fact that I hold my breath across them and wince as they sway is more of a flagging trust in human capabilities than an innate fear of bridges themselves.   Many of our bridges are aging and need repairs, over 60,000 of them, in fact.  So there’s that.  The old London-Bridge-is-falling-down nursery rhyme doesn’t really help either.  Or those stories about trolls and such living underneath.

Bridges often are the only means to get from here to there, and the truth is, sometimes transitions are just hard.   And, oh, goody, life is chock full of these vulnerable, hold-your-breath, learn-to-trust moments.   I envy those people who can cartwheel across those bridges with no trepidation.   While new and exciting things might wait on the other side, leaving the familiar soil of this side, where my feet are on solid ground and the scenery is just fine, can cause excessive hand wringing.

I have a salt water aquarium in my living room. One night, just after its lights had turned off, I witnessed a hermit crab exchanging its shell for a bigger one.  It carefully measured the bigger shell with its antennae.  Using its claws to hoist itself up, in one swift move, it hauled itself out of its shell, scuttled across the sand to the new shell, and edged in backwards.  Voila!   But I was stunned!   All we usually see of these crabs is the legs and head, the parts that stick out from under their comfortable shell.  When it moved from one shell to the next, its body was revealed.  It was a gray comma-like stub, an unformed Voldemort creature.   How brave it was to scuttle out from its familiar house, unprotected and exposed!

All of us have our secret underbellies, like the crab, and it’s the worst thing we can think of to crawl out of our comfortable corners and move–grow–into something new.  Worse still is to admit to anyone else we might be afraid or unsure of ourselves.  Many of us may flinch and wince as we cross bridges of transition—into new careers, empty nests, or life without someone we love.  Sometimes, I admit, I cross those bridges trembling on my knees, clinging to the railing and afraid to look down.  It helps to have folks around who are no less fearless, but who have made those transitions already.   They beckon from the far side, offering encouragement and extending a hand.

Once we make it through our transitions, we can become bridges, of sorts, ourselves.  We can span gaps between generations coming along behind and those ahead of us.  We can be connectors between old ways of thinking and new.  We can extend our hands and assurances that this far side is different, yes, but not so frightening.  There are lots of us over here, and we get it.

Twain said that the only person who likes change is a wet baby.  Like it or not, change is a constant.  Sometimes it demands small alterations, and sometimes it requires of us a full metamorphosis.  It’s almost always a surprise and usually terribly inconvenient.

I’m grateful for those who have been on the far sides of my bridges so far.   A life that is static and fearful is no life at all.   I am learning, slowly, to embrace the change and growth that transitions bring.  Sometimes I still squeeze my eyes shut and take hesitant steps, but I have faith that grace will eventually get me where I’m supposed to be.   None of us can predict what’s coming down the pike next.   But, focusing on the far side, I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.