I have felt a bit under the weather this past week (thank you hormones and a bit of a visiting family and travel schedule), and have not able to sleep as well as normal. This leaves me a bit weary (obviously) and prone to feeling even more than usual. I have found myself at least twice a day on the verge of tears recounting a story or talking about the experiences of this past year. I am a cryer, but not at all to this extent. I think . . . I'm quite sure, the walls I've built up against feeling too much of anything in these past years of crazy raising children and husbands and family and church and friends are beginning to come down. Lately, I feel these floods of emotions so foreign to me I'm not sure what to do with it.
Today, I've decided there is nothing to do with it but feel it. Let it wash over me. Acknowledge it and maybe even embrace it.
It's odd because it sounds so easy to do right? Embrace these tender feelings and emotions and be one with them. But it's not easy. It's hard. It fills my throat up with tears and my head hurt with feelings. I am both full and hungry at the same time. I am worried and at peace. I am excited about the future and fear the unforseen. I want my baby girl to go on her mission and at the same time want to tie her to the bed and ban her from leaving. I want everyone to leave me alone and be right here beside me.
I sound like a crazy person, huh? But that's how these emotions are. This, I think, is the crux of middle age. You are both invigorated by the idea of having no children at home and finally getting to working on you and feel absolute lack of motivation by the idea that there will no one to cook and clean for in a few short years. It's quite an icky place to be in. Hence the mad busyness I've been trying to get myself wrapped up in so I don't have to think anymore.
Jobs, work, something else to take my mind away from all this is my answer, and I'm not saying it really isn't the answer, but I think somehow, someway, I need to work through these wildly opposite feelings and come to an angle of repose . . ..
And I think that's what these low feelings are and all this wash of tenderness and gratitude and concern and joy and everything is telling me to slow down for a minute and just feel.
Anne Murrow Lindburg would go to a cottage by herself every year for three weeks on Sanibel Island to write and think and renew. She wrote a book there, Gifts from the Sea. It's about mothering and aging and living in a bit of a chaotic world with responsibilities all over the place and figuring out balance meeting your own needs. I first read it when I was sixteen and thought I under stood it. I read it again as a young mother, and knew I understood it then. And as a thirty something year old I read it once again and said, Ah, I know what you are talking about.
It turns out that there are truths for us in every age and turn and that we need guides as we manage these tricky life changes. I love so much that she acknowledges that there is a joy and a pain in every stage of our lives. I think of myself at each of these stages, the worries and fears I had. Would I ever even marry and have children to write about? And as a young mother, would I have more children? Would they grow up ok? Would I survive it? And as a mother in the thick of business and children demands wondering if I'd ever have a single second to myself agin? And now . . . as they are growing up and out and doing it so beautifully, thinking, now what? Where do I turn to?
The answer, right now, seems to be inward. Asking hard questions like, who are you right now? What do you love? What are the dreams you've buried deep down and how do we dredge them out? I'm asking those questions . . . and I think, this final few weeks of this daily search, I want to start asking these questions and writing about them. Because I have a feeling I'm not alone in this search. I'm not alone waking up wondering where and who I am and how do I once again navigate my life--just as I did after I gave birth to my first baby and slowly and laboriously evolved into a mama. These are big changes. They'll take time and work. But that's what this time is for, I think. To relearn the ways of my heart and mind.
So as of today, I am letting this flow in. I am allowing myself to feel tender and vulnerable and exposed. I'm giving birth to a new me.
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