#062323: Out of control or into the free fall

Thoughts on clawing, landing and being a mom. Also Letter of Rec #047

My kids are out of school for the summer, and there is this ten-day gap between now and when camp starts and I have been looking forward to this bridge because (and I’ve said this before) spending time with kids is like eating healthy to the extent that the more you do it, the more you crave it and I have been craving the slowdown they tend to bring in, when the days become long and stretchy and the most menial rituals and thoughts become fun: the subway and bus rides, the errands we run.

These vulnerably liminal periods of nothing can make so much magic when you’re open to them or they can suffocate the hell out of you, and the shift can take place in a matter of minutes, which occurred to me in stark practice on Wednesday morning, when after a great Tuesday of hang time and stretchiness, a to-do list branded as scavenger hunt, I almost slapped myself in the face for forgetting to pack a bottle of water for one of my daughters. Like I turned on myself so quickly, got trapped in the room where the ceilings too low for forgetting something in good faith.

It’s funny because on Monday, when we were on our way home from the day, I felt like I’d had this revelation about how much ownership you can claim over the choices you make by simply rebranding them.

I’d had this palpable experience when my daughter fell asleep and I had to wake her up to get off the bus and I gently ushered her back to consciousness while stroking her hair with one of my arms as I rolled her scooter, which kept tipping over, with my other arm.

Every time it tipped over I had this fantasy of grabbing it by both of my fists and crashing it into the cement with the force of my shoulders until all the energy that was in my arms left over and dissolved into the debris. How could I keep so much calm on one side of my person and dream of destruction with the other at the same time? I felt so out of control — and in a subsequent moment, I recognized that the flip side of feeling so out of control is letting yourself bask in the free fall.

When I say out of control, I mean it emotionally — because the thing about hanging out with kids is that all these atomic feelings are right there on the surface and it’s intense to be in such close proximity to this magnitude of radioactive depth. When you can dance between love and rage or ambition and failure or courage and hopelessness, sheer thrill and despondence, commitment and betrayal within the very same step, it can feel like it is destabilizing you — can have you misplace your confidence.

But the thing is (and I think this is part of the rebrand): I never feel more alive — more aware of, yes, death, taxes, and root canals but also of life force, the sunset, and air so sweet its nectar can caramelize as it rolls through your lungs — as when I am alone with my kids.

In these moments, I am both helpless and almighty. My nerve endings are raw.

And in the past, I have hated this feeling. I don’t think I realized that I could give in, just go with it until it was Wednesday morning when I’d forgotten the water bottle on our way out. I was so aware of the succession of thoughts that came next too, how I wanted to blame x, y and z, how I wished I was there, not here. How I thought of how easy it would have been if q, but no, I’m stuck in this puddle of r. Poor me! Poor them! Poor us. There has got to be a better way.

It would have been so easy to land there and stay, to disrupt the free fall, claw into the familiarity of turning on myself, landing there to avoid the free fall just as I have done so many times before.

But why choose to land there and stay when I do? To claw into this surface above any other, leaving the fall instead of letting it take me someplace that is possibly, probably softer?

It felt right to consider that sometimes the places we’ve become expert at finding our ways to — the comfortable zones that feel like they’re stable because they’re so familiar — may no longer be worth even the layover.

And it felt empowering too to recognize that the why doesn’t matter as far as the clawing, that the simple difference between choosing to claw and letting myself continue to fall is a matter of newfound awareness.

It’s as gentle as that.

Have not done much web perusing this week but the shopping-adjacent updates I have include: