Our dog turned one this week. Our son turned seven last week. Both weigh about sixty pounds. Both love to run and wrestle and snuggle and dig and swim in the ocean. They are best friends.
I made a slideshow to celebrate. Nothing fancy. Pulled a bunch of great photos from the past ten months. Set it to iphoto’s default “slideshow music”. We watched it over cake (for us) and a bowser biscuit (for Hank). It doesn’t take much to move me to tears these days. And a reel of photos from the past year set to Apple’s classic slideshow music, replete with strings and crescendos, did the trick. The feeling rising in my chest was a familiar one: nostalgia.
Nostalgia can be heavy, especially if it’s the kind that is dripping with wistfulness or grief or the dizzying passage of time. But it can also be freeing, because inherent in nostalgia is distance. Distance from the thing, perspective on the thing, space between you and the thing. This birthday slideshow conjured the illusion of nostalgia. An illusion because of course, I am still in the thing. It is not yet at a distance nor do I have perspective on or space between myself and it. The thing being the now of the past ten months. The past ten months of puppyhood, parenthood, and pandemic humanhood are a microcosm of time itself. Birth, growth, reckoning, shock, change, adaptation, loss, grief, glory, pain, failure, triumph.
For a moment, when the violins came in and photo after photo of my son’s face buried in various ages and stages of puppy neck folds moved across the screen, my heart caught in my throat and the fleeting figment of nostalgia gave me a glimpse of what it might feel like to look back at this time with some distance. Some perspective. Some appreciation. Some space.
I wondered what it might feel like to stand at a distance from now, from this time. How will we have been changed? Onto what will we have held? What will we have let go? What will we have lost? What will we have gained? What remains? Who will we have become?
My midwives told me that the hours and days and weeks postpartum would be a liquid time. Literally liquid. Leaking, sweating, bleeding, weeping. And figuratively liquid too, as day and night become one and your world shrinks and time slows and you are profoundly unmoored and yet deeply anchored.
Time has not felt quite so liquid since then. Until now. How has it been eleven months since I have seen my family? How do I have a nine month old niece I have never met? How has my first grader been out of school for more months than he was in it? How have we managed to make it through the last ten months? The last four years? How have I not shared a couch and a bowl of popcorn with my best friends while cackling and heckling trashy television this year? How did that puppy become a sixty pound dog? How did that baby become a sixty pound boy?
That sixty pound boy found me crying in a closet a few weeks ago. I hadn’t planned to be found, nor had I planned to start the day crying in a closet. It was a Monday morning and the confluence of a heavy heart and a thousand tiny frustrations and the exhaustion of staring down another yearlong week ahead of us brought me to tears. I needed a moment and a space away to fall apart, to come undone, to let the dam break. When he found me, he sat down next to me and said, “Tell me your troubles, mom.” I caught my breath, pulled myself together, brushed him off. “I’m ok, I am just having a hard morning. Don’t worry about me.” He was undeterred. “It’s ok, mom. Just tell me your troubles. It will help.” Ever the painfully self aware coach, I pleaded, “No, sweetie. You don’t need to hear my troubles. I don’t want you to feel responsible for my grown up feelings and troubles. I’m ok.” Ever the product of his magical self-realized preschool and kimochi-infused kindergarten, ever the son of said self-aware coach, he insisted, “I won’t feel responsible for your feelings, mom. You can tell me. Just share your troubles. It will make you feel better.” And so I did, just a concrete, age-appropriate few of them. And so did he, a few days later, when he turned into a puddle and unloaded his troubles, his pain, his rage, his losses.
We pass around bad moods and unscratched itches and delirious laughing fits and our troubles and cabin fever and tantrums and heavy hearts and simmering rage like a nine month long game of hot potato. We take turns coming undone. We take turns listening. We get scrappy. We soften the edges. We hold on. We let go. We muddle through. And on it goes like that. Unfolding liquid time.
One evening back in February, I sat in the dark waiting room of our vet’s office. I had not slept in days and the exhaustion of life with the new puppy paired with new puppy parent nerves (So. Much. Diarrhea. So. Little. Sleep.) had me bleary eyed and panicky. What had I gotten myself into? While I walked to the end of the hall and waited for the techs to return with my pup, I passed an examination room with the door ajar and caught, out of the corner of my eye, a glimpse of a man and a woman and a dog on the floor. Their faces were pained and red and tear-stained. I could see in their eyes the weight in their hearts. Moments later, I watched the two of them leave the room, thank the vet in repeated grateful whispers, and walk out, huddled together and clearly shaken. Moments after that, I saw the techs bring the dog, covered in a sheet, down the hallway to the back. My heart dropped into my stomach. I am not proud to admit that among the feelings that came up in me, among the compassion and heartache and sympathy and sadness, there was also jealousy. Jealous that they were free. That their story was behind them rather than just beginning. Another part of me felt shocked at the jealousy. But there was no denying it. I was stuck. I couldn’t see or feel my way out of exactly where I was. Bone tired, anxious, spread thin, overwhelmed, in over my head. Of course now, almost a year of life with a dog under my belt, I find myself feeling respite, relief, love, appreciation, wisdom, calm, and pure joy when I watch the rise and fall of his peaceful napping body curled into his bed or climb with him along trails in the fog and eucalyptus, nosing in the air with giddiness and curiosity. I can even feel the outermost edges of the future heartbreak and nostalgia we will feel when he is no longer with us. When we are the ones leaving the vet, huddled and lost and shaken. But not that night. I couldn’t see my way out of where I was that night in February.
Eight years ago, I couldn’t see my way out of being paralyzed by fear and anxiety. Until facing it and living though it forced me to reckon with it.
Seven years ago, I couldn’t see my way out of my labor and birth and postpartum. Until I broke open and let go and surrendered to liquid time.
Last month, I couldn’t see my way out of the twinges of envy and resentment that bubbled up when I saw masked and backpacked neighborhood kids, piling into a car and heading to their reopened schools, their families able to exhale into predictability, to land safely and softly into a net of support and rhythm. Until I released the fears of where we are, the fantasies of where they are, and honored the facts of who we are, who my kid is, what matters to us, and what doesn’t.
Early this week, my mother, a true mama bear, couldn’t see her way out of the heavy weight of sadness and fatigue that overcame her. A broken foot rendering her immobile and unable to use her body to release and process her energy and feelings out in the open air. A society broken by this pandemic rendering her quarantined and distanced from her daughters and grandchildren and brothers and friends. Until she acknowledged the depth of helplessness and rage she felt. A mama bear. A wild mama bear. A wild caged mama bear. She gave herself permission to succumb to her exhaustion. Gave herself permission to weep. To grieve. To feel into and hold tenderly her wild caged spirit.
Sometimes, when we are in it, we can’t see our way out of right where we are. We can’t do or control or numb or work or fight or figure our way out of how we feel. We blindly and frantically feel around for an exit. We grasp in vain at a figment of nostalgia, a portal out of where we are. We strain to hear the wisdom of a future self.
“I can’t do this,” pleads the you who is in it.
"You are doing it,” reminds the you looking back on it.
From the distance and space between this you and that you, you can hear, “Hold on and let go. Throw a fit and ride it out. Show up. Do the work. Honor where you have been. Be with where you are. Embrace the unknown of where you will go from here.”
We can do this.
We are doing this.
We are who we have been.
We are who we are.
We are who we are becoming.
With love and solidarity,
Abby
