The View From Here

 

I looked out my window the other day, intent on gazing at the 'garden', as I refer to my pots of flowers and my raised bed planters on the patio.  I wanted to see if any of the newly planted seeds had come up.  But somehow my focus couldn't stay on the planters.  It was drawn instead to the bike sprawled across the lawn, the playhouse with door invitingly open, the red scooter sitting ready for a rider, the water table, the myriad balls of all sizes scattered over the front lawn, the bubble containers scattered across the tabletop...

It was a vignette all in itself and it spoke to something in me that was deeply satisfied with that vision.  Then as I walked from the kitchen my attention was arrested by the dining table.  Pretty autumn flowers, blue and white buffalo check napkins, purple Ceratops dinosaur...Again I felt that thrum of satisfaction coursing through me.

A year ago, we were steeling ourselves to say goodbye to Caleb.  And not quite a year later, after agony and angst and heartbreak and anger and grief at giving up my own life...I'm here.  Satisfied.  Content.  Tired, true, but tempered by this feeling of a rightness with my world.

It's hard most days, even on the good ones and on the now increasingly rare bad days it's terribly hard, but I cannot deny that somehow, despite my love of my alone time, my desire to be 'retired', I am savoring this time in life to mother another child.  This is without a doubt my favorite age of childhood.  It's lovely to have an infant to nuzzle and kiss the soles of their feet, but these years when they are learning, growing, talking, pretending, exploring their own personality and letting it shine, shine, shine, makes me feel joyful.  

I've missed the mothering part of life.  I have. 

That said, not 24 hours later, I was standing in the same window in tears whispering to myself, "I don't want to do this anymore..."  I was tired from a night of pain and sleeplessness, and a simple spate of back talk had proven to be my undoing.

It is a mixture of emotions, this life as a grandmother with full time care of a child.  I say full time not because Katie isn't a participant but because Katie is working and not here during the waking hours of the week.  Caleb established his own schedule ages ago.  He's ready for bed by 6:30 and usually asleep within minutes.  Try as she might, Katie is barely home before he's begging her to put him to bed.  I'll share that it was just so with Katie herself when I worked.  There were days that I didn't even get a glimpse of her because by the time I came after work, she was half asleep in my arms, and later when she was in primary school and my job at the doctor's office ran late, she was already in bed when I walked in.

I feel it's not a part time thing when you are the caregiver from 7am until 6pm every weekday.  I'm more than a daycare service.  I am emotionally and spiritually invested in this little boy's life, and I am here for him day in and day out in a way that his mama can't be.  It's a privilege and a burden all at once.

Tie all of that up with this awareness I carry around that this will not always be the way life is. I may be weary but I'm also trying to squeeze all the goodness and sweetness I can from these long days.  I know that Katie is going to move on in her life and when she goes, Caleb will naturally move with her.  I don't know when that might be.  I've been feeling the wind of change now for months.  At the very least, he will start school next year, so no later than late July/ early August and these days will end.  Other circumstances might well change prior to that.  One never knows just when a change will occur.

I know that whenever it comes, it will be the right time.  But I grieve for what I will lose, just as I grieve the end of any other season in life these days, natural and otherwise. I am struggling to let go of the reins I've held and to trust God in all things.  But I do not miss the irony that just as I've found my peace in this place, I must start to release it.  Ending seasons do make me grieve these days.

Grief has sat with me all this year long.  Tears have been worn a good deal lately, sigh.

Just last week, I was suddenly filled with longing for a great aunt who kept us on weekends for a brief season of life while my parents visited my grandfather who was in the hospital in her city.   Somehow in my mind she was living yet and then it occurred to me that morning, that it was impossible! She had died at some unknown time in the past.  Where was I?  Why didn't I know?  Why had I not attended her funeral?  My eyes filled with tears just thinking of missing that last opportunity to say goodbye to someone who had been loving and kind to us children.   Silly perhaps, but there they were.

The day before, a cousin who knew that great aunt far better than I, contacted me.  She and her mom wanted to visit Mama.  That sent me into an emotional dervish that never should have begun in the first place.  So works my mind at times.  I was immediately on the defensive.   My issue was fear of what Mama would say, how she would portray me to them.  The old defensiveness arose.  I contemplated my reply to the cousin far too long.  

I felt the need to make excuses for myself, to justify my place in life.  In the end I did none of those things.  I simply gave her Mama's contact information and encouraged the visit.  The truth is that over the years I've had barely any contact with this cousin and aunt.  I have no animosity towards them.  I remember them fondly from childhood.   I can't control what Mama thinks, or what she feels the need to tell others.  She can't see herself clearly.  She's never been able to see me clearly either.   

I have always been super critical of who I am, hyper analytical about my actions, thoughts, motives, deeds.  I had to be in order to sort out all the external voices who insisted they knew me in ways I could never know myself.  So, I learned to pick apart every criticism and apply those parts that proved to be valid.  

But the things that proved not to be true were never discarded.  They were hung on my person like old ugly rags I never took off and carried with me everywhere I went.  I'd stop periodically and examine them one by one all over again, still trying to see why the person issuing them thought they had validity.

After weeping off and on all that day long, I finally took myself off to bed and slept like a rock all night long.  I woke well rested, with an attitude adjustment that only good sleep can bring. The next day, I went into the kitchen after lunch to prep supper ahead and as I worked, I found myself having an imaginary visit with the same cousin who'd texted me.  In this pretend visit, I told her what an accomplished woman Mama was, how I felt her pain, how I found my own peace...A huge difference from the woman who stood here the day before weeping wondering what they would all think of me.

Why can't I be that person more often?  Why can't I be centered and well-adjusted and comfortable with myself, instead of putting on and examining those old ugly rags over and over again?  Why can't I just let them go?

Let us fast forward to Sunday.  I kept telling John all that day how much I'd admired the barnwood planked walls and so longed to do the same on the one wall of my dining room.  Yet the whole while something kept niggling around in my brain, something to do with wood walls.  

On Monday I was sitting at the breakfast table reminding John of the wood wall idea, and then recalling my conversation with Isacc on Saturday about my deep desire as a child to learn to read and write.  And then the whole thing clicked together.  I saw the scene clearly.  Daddy's reading chair pulled close to the window so the light would touch his paper in the evening giving much needed extra light from the single bulb in the center of the ceiling.  The bare wood planked walls of the room (and ceiling and floor).  My deep-seated desire to read burning in me so hard.   I leaned against the arm of Daddy's chair as he read through the comics and I'd point and ask, "What word is that?"  Several such interruptions would finally lead him to lift me onto his lap and he'd point to each cartoon balloon caption and read out the words to me slowly.  

And later, when I was finally in first grade, I'd bring home a tiny manila envelope each week with a set of letters and from those letters I was to make that week's spelling words and sometimes simple sentences every evening as homework.  I would sit on the floor beside Daddy's reading chair, and he'd watch over my work, gently correcting, encouraging me when I hesitated in spelling a word.

I looked at John over the breakfast table with tears in my eyes and I couldn't even speak for the thickness that constricted my throat.  Finally, I was able to share my memory and I said, "Why did I ever believe he didn't love me?  Why did I let another convince me that he never had?  The very things I've remembered says to me that he was a loving father!"  And then I did weep, for the lies that stood between us all our lives, that kept our heart for one another hidden away, until that morning when I was nursing him at the end of his life.  I'd felt peace and love flood the room and wash away 50 years of hurt as though they had never been.

It might be a dry autumn outdoors, but it's weepy one for me thus far!

I'm not melancholy, though it might sound so.  I am ready for the next season, and even curious about what it might hold.   No need to start making plans just yet for that day ahead.  I will settle in and enjoy the time I have and accept that this too is a passing season, and it will come in its own good time as seasons always do.

In the meantime, I am enjoying this autumn, gently, not cramming it full of busyness but savoring it.  I spend some time each morning outdoors with Caleb sitting in the dappled shade of the Faith Tree.  He is wandering these days, going far and wide away from me as I sit there and then circling back to the patio.  He's not one for playing.  He's seeking, but I don't know what.  He's peering into the woods at various points and looking hard through the trees to that mysterious world beyond.  How little does he know that he's getting himself ready for a future that doesn't include this home or me or John as center of his world.  He is already looking beyond the safety of what he knows into the unknown and he's endlessly curious about it all, as well he should be.  

And just so must I go peer into the unknown.  I have one advantage.  I knew this place before the woods.  I know what is on the other side, but I've forgotten much now the landscape is changed so there's something new there beyond.   We are a pair, he and I, looking at the view from here, ready to traverse that new world.