I’ve been struggling to relate to the folks in my daily life, because I’ve stopped trying to “fit” into a role that I thought was easily understood in my community. Also, I’m no longer certain who my community is. Acting in roles is easy when you grew up taught to please, and found your way to survival via the graciousness of others1 and demands.
Recently, for survival sake, I’ve dropped many emotional responsibilities, because I couldn’t carry them without landing permanently in a sanatorium. Plus the food sucks, and it’s challenging to gain credibility as a creative human from the loopy halls of a loony bin2.
This dropping of care-taking others businesses was freeing, necessary, and given me some of my energy back. I can actually get through a day without biting people’s heads off, rapidly hashing through a huge list of tasks, or bursting into loud and jumpy night terrors which my poor husband has needed to try to sleep around…
And now that I’m not working so hard, I realize I’m grieving a role I’ve played. Acted like my life depended on it. My role of mom of school-aged children is changing fast, and I feel a terrible sadness about this loss.
The practical job of mom includes enough “to dos” to push anyone’s days to overwrought. And that’s maybe manageable if you are a stay-at-home mom and bored, which I am not. So I’m so glad I found the emotional aspect of mothering so deeply satisfying. Anyone approaching mom-ness with mulchy love knows how much a parent’s emotional availability, presence, and creativity makes a place where kids feel safe, where they can grow and learn, so they too can become themselves most fully and launch when ready.
Moms are expected to keep feeding everyone. And isn’t feeding others a kind of endless slog? There’s mac and cheese in the cabinet people!
And, seriously, moms can’t provide all the emotional nourishment all the time. It’s exhausting.
And as my children grow and we practice cutting the apron strings (there are so many, I think we’ll be trimming this thing off me for eternity), I feel several things: a mixture of dark and light. I’ll try to describe below.
Mourning. This mourning I feel is perhaps is about how my role is changing, and how I’m saying goodbye to a sweeter day where my goals were simpler and understood. My sense of grief is ongoing; my children are developing into their own people, as they should be, but I still linger in nostalgia for the days when I was uber-responsible for their everything and had little pals to have adventures with.
I miss the adventures most.
My connections with other parents were so wonderful too. So much conversation, swirling around common-speak of raising kids, nature adventures, and learning activities. They fed my soul as much as my kids’. Now I don’t know what to talk about. Most of my friends don’t care for philosophy and spiritual engineering3. Do you?
Anticipation. This is a positive feeling, but also a bit excitable, so I try to stay calm and patient about receiving the answers: How will my children grow? Who are they becoming? Who am I becoming? What’s my next project? What’s coming next down the river of life? How can we ride that with grace and love?
Mourning Up. While cutting apron strings with my kids, I’m simultaneously watching my parent’s physical and mental decline, I know I have work here too. To look out for them, love them even when annoyed and harried, and to do copious paperwork and handle tasks, to stop by even when busy, and to help support the other supporters of these elderly bodies and minds.
Honestly, this responsibility makes me feel like an pissy child: “but you are supposed to take care of me!” and all that. Embarrassing Shame. Need combined with care-taking can be a tough emotional ride.
But I feel like maybe I’m just supposed to listen, and reveal their stories…
Work, What? It’s work to manage the emotional well being of a home. And it is work to handle the financial ones too (I’ll gladly receive a tip, because as a former waitress, I can comfortably accept income of this nature, which I need right now). It is work to manage all the tiny little details like permission slips, and finding camps before it’s too late, and fixing the dryer because it squeaks.
It’s work to also run one’s own business (gloriously self-sustaining for 20 years, until one client seemed to single-handedly crash my client pipeline and steady income, but alas, maybe this too was a gift.) It is work to identify, plan, and to execute a rolling set of never-ending tech tasks in an unstable environment for organizations and people. It’s work to protect and handhold others’ fears while facing incompetents and bad actors on the Internet. It is work to keep tech stuff maintained too. It’s work to show up friendly, creative, enthusiastic and calming, and kind when you are exhausted.
It’s work to put aside your own desires for the greater good.
Stop the presses: maybe our desires are a bona fide part of the greater good?
It’s also work (for me) to try to relate to people, because I’m not sure how many actually see me as anything other than a giving machine: a tool to be used to achieve their desires. I’ve had an unfortunate track record of that happening, so have also become a little wary of shiny taker-types.
While writing this, a rainy morning while both my kids are still sleeping, and I feel like physically crying. Grief is here again. And it Welcome, because grief is healing me right now.
When I grieve, I know I feel. My body has been holding so much for so many, for waayyy too long, and it has to let it go.
“Tears are of the spirit,” said one of my elder teachers, no longer reachable by phone. I’m grieving him too.
So, I’ll keep writing, fielding tears, listening to more stories, and maybe even telling you a few of my own…
My new role may include storyteller. I would like it to be.
FOOTNOTES & SUB-SUBTEXT 😉
- What was the first way you received money/green energy? This tells a tale of your approach to wealth-building, that’s if you even think that’s important…. ↩︎
- Unless you are gifted and most self-aware like world class artist Yayoi Kusama, who makes astonishing art every day and retires to a mental hospital each night. God bless this gem of a woman. ↩︎
- Spiritual Engineering is to me, identifying the paths of consciousness, the mechanisms of meaning-making and the practicable ways to access the divine (or at least inner peace). ↩︎
