Three years go, I sat on my friend/spiritual mentor’s couch sipping tea and predicting how I would respond to our upcoming Australian relocation: I would feel disoriented, anxious, stuck in a dream- or hellscape, depending on the day. She told me something that, at first, I didn’t understand. She said, “You’re going to need to give yourself some space.”
I get it now, even if I’m still not fully able to put it into words. But I’ll try! This has been a week of radical self-awareness and care, our Unintentional Annual Moving Week, timed hellishly with so many other events. I’ve listened to my body as it reacts to each of the myriad (real and self-perpetuated) stressors. I’ve felt the anger and exhaustion. I’ve acknowledged the resentments and sense of loss and transience. I’ve exercised and slept. I’ve breathed. I’ve prayed. I’ve stayed away from the alcohol (for now). I’ve eaten chocolate. I’ve made list upon list and checked things off dramatically. I’ve been still. I’ve ducked away and stolen moments for myself. I’ve observed Advent with years-kept rituals that ground me.
This morning, I had a FaceTime sesh with my OG counsellor. It was another thing on another list, but it was also life being breathed into me.
Yesterday was The Kid’s birthday. It was also his school’s annual dance concert–what has turned into a yearly triumph of his spirit and progress. It was, also, another thing on another list. It was, also, life being breathed into me. Strange how something can be both.
I’ve had Little Brother at home with me 66% more of the time than usual because this is how we survive and do self-care too: by choosing not to put ourselves through the emotional upheaval of him facing a bully and what feels like an unsafe environment. There are times I have pushed, and will have to push, him into those zones, where he’ll have to see for himself that his perceptions are not always completely accurate, but this week? This week we’ve gone to the zoo and the mall and the couch for cuddles and this has been both hard and life-giving too. We are knowing each other in ways we didn’t before, all because some kid was being a shit to him, and that’s both awful and wonderful. Why do awful and wonderful so often have to arrive paired?
He has had space from school, from fear, and I’ve had…less space to myself. But more with him. More wandering around the zoo hearing him spill his knowledge on Sumatran tigers and meerkats. Time for him to be the teacher. This is also space, and life.
As we once again fit our life into boxes and pre-organize accordingly, I’ve held onto and thrown out slips of random paper, and on Monday I told TK’s school librarian: “I’m not the kind of person who loses books! Let me know what I need to do,” and she asked for the title of the book, and when I told her, she said it had already been found, it was never lost in the first place. Our family flits from house to house and home to home and I know we’re the same.
This week has lasted ten years and my schedule is all thrown off so I missed my weekly group Monday-morning hike. Tuesday morning instead found me going it alone, with a full day ahead and a short time available for wandering. I took to the footpaths I know, and from above the beach I could see the waves gently lapping. I ached to get down there, to spend a moment watching the calm of the early-morning sea, but there wasn’t time: I could only watch from a distance that day. I turned around and headed back toward home, which is to say my family, and thought about how giving myself space sort of feels like listening to Christmas music in the smoky heat or singing “It Is Well with My Soul” while chaos reigns all around me–two things I’ve been known to do lately–and believing that is can also mean it will be, that even when I’m not on it, the beach is still there, and I will get back there and until then, I’ll have to settle for it being a part of me.