When It Rains...

Hello again friends, I hope you’ve been well.

The last couple of months have been kind of overwhelming, and not in a bad way. It’s been the kind of overwhelming that pushed me to the edge of emotion, good and bad, enough to leave me grateful for my life at every turn.

At the end of April I began a temporary ‘enhanced placement’ at work. For two months I enjoyed new challenges, the opportunity to grow and the privilege of working in collaboration with great and generous people. I was more tired than usual, working a challenging and hectic 8 hour, 5 day work week while managing to provide most of the care for our son and doghter while my husband worked extremely long days. A feat not uncommon to many hardworking women, and certainly one I was pleased to experience. It was exciting, fulfilling, illuminating. And then it was done.

In the middle of this I took part in the Relay for Life. I was happy to have the opportunity to do my part to support efforts to squash the enemy disease and honour the memory and valiant struggles of so many survivors and victims, including my father-in-law. The night of the Relay I found myself yawning repeatedly, uncontrollably, while chatting with a friend. It took me a few days to realize why - I wasn’t overly tired at that point, it was still early. After some introspection I realized I had been trying desperately to choke back tears, or rather throat aching sobbing. Sure, I was feeling sad about the devastation cancer has indiscriminately delivered to so many good people, but the instinct to purge was coming from a place more complicated. I felt lucky that as a female I had been instructed over my lifetime by a variety of influences that crying is a legitimate way to let go, to empty myself out. I needed to flush out my emotional banks which were stuffed with things that had been piling up for months, and I knew that only tears could provide that kind of cleansing.

In the last two years I have been gratefully overwhelmed by so many things from the torturous birthing of my boy, the unparalleled jubilation of finally meeting him, the damage done to my body, the transition of my husband and myself to dad and mama, the desperation of sleeplessness, the beauty of watching and fostering the growth and development of a vessel of pure instinct and wonder, my reluctant release of him to another caregiver as I returned to work and the rollercoaster ride my job had become. I needed to flush out the excesses of joy, pain, growth and disappointment that had accumulated in my heart stretching back perhaps even as far as before my son was born.

I continued to put the tears off and felt pretty low for a few days, though I believe some of my resolve was lost in the sleeplessness of a home filled with my sick and coughing family – even my dog had kennel cough! Then one day I finally had a rare moment to myself, my son was in bed, my husband was at work, and the movie Marley and Me was on TV. I had read the book and seen the movie already and knew what I was in for, so I kept watching, waiting for the permission I couldn’t give myself. And then I cried. I wept. I sobbed. Then I stopped. I felt pretty good. I had found some peace at last. Time passed and my smile returned with my generally positive resolve.

Two weeks ago my neighbours’ son died. I did not know him, though we met a couple of times. I continued to cry. I saw pictures of him as a boy and could not help but think of my own boy, my own family. I can feel my neighbours’ pain now in a way I could not two years ago.

It occurred to me a while back, after I had my son, that maybe my emotional being had been broken somehow by all of the hormones involved in being pregnant. It seemed that my emotions were stuck in overdrive, on intense mode. Not necessarily over-reactive, but undeniable. I’ve been pretty good at keeping myself emotionally ‘in check’ for most of my life. I guess what I’ve come to realize now is that as much as I always thought I was, I’m just more tuned in now to the rest of the world, to my own feelings, to the experiences and feelings of others. In some ways it’s a more exhausting place to be, but mostly I feel like I’m looking around with clarity and connection, with new eyes, with better vision. I am grateful.

The photo above features my hula hoop loving vessel of instinct and wonder.

Take care my friends:)