just a little more outward than I’m used to

I woke up to a kaleidoscope. As it got brighter and brighter, I knew what it was, some sort of aura or ocular something that if you google, it may scare you into calling a doctor. I asked my husband to get me three Advils and a Coke to ward off the threat of a migraine. I rested in bed as my thoughts raced they way they always do, and I eventually listened to an “emergency meditation” on Calm. Just like the web engine doctors said, the blinding light is gone now. They throbbed and danced possibly to remind me of anxiety in the most blinding yet beautiful way, all those colors and light refusing to be unseen. Underneath slime-making wth kids and summer photos and hydrangeas in vases, I feel these jabs of sadness that are not unfamiliar.

I was getting an annual physical the other day, and my doctor, a passionate woman who has lived 5 lives colorful lives under that white coat, said that I’ve looked better than I have since 2012. All my working out has paid off, she said. But when I told her about this newer thing—this chest tightening—that I had easily named because it’s just part of American life, we continued chatting as we normally do, like two friends over coffee. She mentioned that our brains make these pathways that they remember. For example, if something triggers another emotion, it’s likely the same or similar thing will trigger the same exact line of thought you felt the first time. It’s important to fork that pathway to go to another street, the metaphor suggests. We casually talked about this because I told her about my unexpected blip at a Korean spa, this place that can’t be explained (people have tried; trust me, you just have to go to one), only experienced.

It took me years to agree to go to one—the kind where you can’t wear clothes and where you’re given “humble one-cut prison pajamas” when you go into the common area— and it was at my literal most naked moment where someone’s grandmother was dutifully scrubbing skin off me that I had this irrational thought of something awful happening to my daughter and this realization that I was unreachable. I knew the kids were with Kal, and I knew better in general. My phone was just one room away locked with my other belongings, and I couldn’t reach it from where I was. I had to assure myself that I could, indeed, get up and check it. At any angle of my brain, though, something awful was happening, and I was unreachable. The larger the thought, the larger the panic. It took me about 45 minutes of imagery and self patience to get myself away from the desperation of that feeling. I already had tools to help myself because I have reviewed them with my students; I’ve had to use it before, but it’s never been this essential. An hour later, it was done, and I was in the “pajamas” with my friend who is like a walking amethyst crystal, full of healing. In fact, she is the one who first gave me the idea years ago that imagining a river of cool water helps her ground into reality. I noticed that when we joined together, walking from from hut to hut inside the spa, that I quietly held in my experience. I didn’t want to ruin the occasion, but I told her about it later and casually over ice cream.

I think maybe I’m my best self when I’m around people, engaging with them or answering questions, fixing a plate and offering a space to talk. Like this quote by Amanda Palmer: “Just letting someone speak their truth can sometimes be the biggest gift you give them, to just hold the space for them.”  And like anyone else, I need alone time to patch up the likely invisible slits in my armor. My husband is too busy in his work life to know what to do about it. Which means that like so many other things I sense we need in our family life, figuring out how to fix, organize, and encourage the momentum of our life falls on me. It makes me feel like I’m letting my life down when I just don’t feel up to the challenge. I recognize I need to find the space and time to do this for myself, but it’s hard to arrange. It makes me feel there is yet another thing I have to plan and prepare to do, which perpetuates resentment and stress.

This has little to do with him or really any supportive partner taking out the trash and working hard to make ends meet, two symbols I equate with marital patterns and necessities that are easy to overlook unless, well, they stink.  It’s not at all an appreciative or fair to him, but even knowing that doesn’t get me less frustrated at how much unseen falls on me: list making, travel anticipating, life-sensing.  In short, I feel when anything in our life coughs in the middle of the night that I’m the one whose eyes pop open and think about ways I should follow up on it the next day. I’ve learned that this, for me and for my mother and mothers I see, is the component of being a woman and a mother and my version of an adult. It’s not unlike when I fought against daily lunch unpacking + packing always falling on me–right alongside all the other nightly stuff–until one day it became clear that I just do it better, and because I want that for my kids, I took it on with renewed mission.

I watch women who are 20 years older than me waiting in line at the store, and I can see this look in their eyes. It’s different than the exhausted new mom who stares blankly because she’s overwhelmed and the baby is still crying; it’s actually one of impatience and almost irritation. I look at those eyes now and can sense that life does that to a woman. It makes her wiser of herself and what she doesn’t want to do, like maybe in this case waiting for the teenager to find the right buttons on the register, but it also has a curious sediment. It’s a little terrifying and mostly fascinating that women’s eyes are keenest storytellers.

Today the kids aren’t home for a few more hours. I’m supposed to be hopping from one store or place to another in preparation for a family trip coming up, likely another source of the blinding but beautiful lights. The house is still, and I don’t feel up to the race just yet. I will post this message and walk away feeling relieved for a moment, then hyper aware of feeling I overshared or that it doesn’t fit with what you may see in me when you meet me especially because people bring out the best in me. It is, however, something I needed to share, and it is, however, the acknowledgement of the thing—the sense that my instinct doesn’t want to be muffled—that has gotten back to this computer. A runner-up to talking with that one friend, trying to write something out is probably the closest, most meaningful effort to truth-finding and space-holding as I have likely experienced.

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