To Wallow
Tate is feeling blue. I see it. I smell it. I don’t want her to feel it; yet, I know she must.
I don’t totally know why and yet, from years of parenting an emotional child, I know I don’t need to.
As I remind myself of all this, and watch my insides perform emotional Olympics, my heart bending in ways it doesn’t like to, I breathe and check in with myself. In order to somehow accept and allow for it, I remind myself that’s all I have to do.
Still, my stomach is a blurry, sloshy mix of hunger, sadness, wanting, anger and seasickness - because here we go again, onto this awful train ride.
Tate puts on her ‘sad song’ - Ocean Eyes. She presses the repeat symbol so it’ll play over and over again.
I put on my patient, nowhere else to be, warm train conductor hat and settle in. Open heart. Sturdy back.
She’s already crying.
I’m steady. Not too empathetic (she doesn’t like that), not too botox-faced (she doesn’t like that either). I nod gently. I tell myself she’s on the right path, to healing, and that I am too. I’m not afraid.
And I believe it.
Messiness like this is okay. Beautiful, actually - when it isn’t resisted. So, I open. Again. And again.
This is when Tate, my big girl, looks over at me with swollen eyes and lets her long torso literally cave. She slumps herself over, curled into my lap. She lets herself feel missing that old friend whom that song reminds her of. Wallow in the pain, the loss, the grief, the hurt we all feel.
My judgy mind asks, “Maybe she was in LOVE with this girl? Maybe she’s gay - maybe I’ve missed this somehow. I mean this has been lot of times - this song, these memories. This level of sadness.” My brain gets all busy in it’s old patterns - judgy and squirrely.
With my breath, I bring myself back to the here and now, and quiet my mind by trusting in the power of being able to sometimes just wallow. The gift of that. And the gratitude I feel in her allowing me to hold her through it. To witness her, my fiercely independent child, being that vulnerable.
I say very little. “So hard, honey, so hard.”
She cries and cries and cries.
She used to beg me to let her BE. When I nagged. When she made mistakes. When I’d come into her room.
And now, I hear the begging in the far-off distance and suddenly understand it more clearly. More sweetly.
