So full disclosure, it is just about 3am as I start to write this.  And its not the “I’ve been burning the midnight oil” 3am.  Its more like a “Good Morning” 2 hours too early kind of thing.  Midlife is a delight sometimes.  If I drink after 7pm I have to get up to go to the bathroom more times than I would like to admit and then sometimes my mind takes off and there is no going back to sleep.  I usually choose to write during these times.  The things that my mind is racing about are usually things that I want to write about anyway.  Lucky you! 

This time my mind woke me up and got going round and round about the idea of time.  How much time we are allotted.  How that time allotment is the same if you are living your best life or living on skid row.  How some moments slip away like sand through your hands and other moments last way too long.  There is just a real mind bending nature to time.  Einstein’s theory of relativity in the space time continuum at work, I guess. And as I woke up to write this blog last spring, I was feeling pretty beat up by time.

It was a specific time for me, as I watched my first born finish high school.  Lots of grief goes with that.  And even though you think you are ready for it and you have mentally prepared as much as you can, grief can knock you down without a moment’s notice, whether you like it or not.  And boy did it.  It started around my birthday at the end of February and kept going until at least mid May.  It didn’t help that as a Midwest resident my Vitamin D stores were depleted by February and I didn’t have the opportunity to fill them back up with good old sunlight yet. (For those of you who don’t live in a place that only has 7 or 8 hours of sunlight most of the winter, what this means is you are moody as hell and depressed, the result of good old Mother Nature.) All and all though, I was much more compassionately self-aware during this experience than I had been about grief ever before.  A skill I had really been working on (and will continue to work on and teach about at LearnToLoveYourStory.com).

At first I found myself wanting to run from the grief. I wanted to push that shit away as far as I possibly could.  Yet, just as I teach in all realms of my career, the discomfort is the place to stay when you don’t understand something.  As hateful as that may seem, showing up to your discomfort with curiosity and compassion and letting the message reveal itself is the best medicine for these kinds of things (that’s compassionate self-awareness in action).  So I sat in that shit for a hot minute.  And as I sat I started to think. I thought about time. About lost time with my son.  About new time his life was about to embark on.  And about what time looks like for me now that he is aging.  That last little bit is what stopped me dead in my tracks.  

Here is what I imagined I saw.  The same fucking day over and over again for the next 10 years.  Terrifying!  I have another child who is 10 years younger than my first and what I was staring down the barrel of was a rinse repeat life until she would become a senior in high school.  Don’t get me wrong, I am blessed and am one of those really despicable people that loves her time with her kids, so that is not what bothered me about it.  What bothered me about it was that having fun with my kids is not the only aspect of my life as I raise them.  Especially as a single parent.  There is a lot of work attached to that, both in my work outside and inside the home.  And what I was looking at was feeling stuck in doing things the same way that I had always done them, because…just because.  What else do you do?  Ah, and there is where the true nugget of my grief was laying.  Are you tracking with me?  If not, no worries, this was a bit of a puzzle for even me to unravel.  

Ok then.  So I spent some nights (and days) giving myself time to cry and yell and thrash, and all the things that come with grief and grieving.  I tried to bargain with myself that this was not what this was (again, one of the stages of grief) and eventually resolved myself to facing that there is a part of my life that was coming to an end, and it wasn’t the part that I had prepared for. What part is that?  The part of me that was hustling to be sure that everything was cared for in my children’s lives, in ex-spouses’ lives, in my extended family’s lives, in my friends’ lives, and in my clients’ lives.  It was the part of me that saw herself as a kind of Sherpa, here to carry the load for everyone else.  It was a survival mechanism born out of my chaotic childhood, in which I learned that my worth was derived from the value of my accumulated deeds for others.  It was time for her and I to part.  I do not have to survive my life anymore…or maybe its that she is not responsible for looking down the barrel of a rinse repeat life for another decade.  Most likely its both.  

The truth is she has been on autopilot in the background of my life, despite my best efforts to heal from that pattern and lots of therapy to redefine this aspect of myself. I had set firm boundaries and really didn’t think she was around anymore.  And yet, there she was in the background doing her thing, making sure that all is taken care of, because without that to do she starts to panic. And her panic is not my favorite experience.  In fact it is excruciating for me to deal with.  When there isn’t other lives to care for, this part of me doesn’t know what to do with herself.  Her continued existence was tied to my son.  A contract of sorts that I entered into unwittingly at his birth.  Again, a remnant of an existence I created coming out of a chaotic childhood.  

Now, in all fairness I had done a TON of work on this aspect of myself.  The reality was that I had cut her out of doing this in every other area of my life but with my son.  I understand now, that was because of the nature of how much changed for he and I during his high school years.  Somehow, she had convinced me in the subtle way that she does that I needed to continue to employ her version of caring for him as my final tie to him during his childhood.  Needless to say, none of this is actually true.  Its just a story I’d been telling myself about the world since as young as I could remember.  And because it already hurts to be raising a child who is aging and individuating away from you, I had left this aspect of myself to its own devices.  

That is until I realized there would be no more games to schlep him to or hurry across the city to get to on time to prove my worth.  There would be no more proms to take pictures at.  There would be no more study help or reading papers.  And there was little else that this aspect of me was doing for him any longer.  The years had already stripped away tucking him into bed and reading him a book each night.  Or letting him play hooky from school and taking him to a movie instead.  Or throwing him the most spectacular of super hero birthdays.  So when the last swim meet was done.  When the last prom was over.  When the last of all the things we do with our teenagers passed, I had nothing more to do but face this part of me and grieve.  

I grieved with her, because lets be honest this is a sad transition for parents.  I grieved for her that she was not sure how she would show her worth in this world.  I grieved her as I told her that there was no longer any space in my life for this old pattern of Human Doing instead of Human Being.  She wasn’t happy about that last part and I needed to wrestle some with her on that.  But the truth was that I had started three years ago to build a life for myself that I wanted to live in.  One pebble at a time I have laid that path out.  And there was not room for this part of me in this new life.  I no longer need to hustle for my worth in parenting.  And believe me, I have met my match with my daughter, so there is no way I would really feel good about myself in that fight.  She is a harder one to please than my son.  And while I no longer needed this part of me to be here proving my worth to my son, I did need to thank this part of me for all she has done.  She was always doing the best she knew how with what she knew to do.  I needed to honor that for her.  And I did in my own way.

I tell you this story to help highlight one of the more difficult aspects of personal growth.  As we grow things change…that’s a given.  What is not so well known is that as we take on new things, new ways of being, new aspects of ourselves during this growth period, we also have to make room for letting go.  This is not like that scene in The Jerk, when Steve Martin is aimlessly walking about his apartment before having to leave saying that he is going to take this lamp and that pillow.  Sometimes with change we just need to say goodbye.  Or at least send off parts of ourselves on a perpetual retirement (I kind of prefer the latter myself).  And that is what I did the Spring my son graduated.  And once this was done, a whole lot of space opened up in my heart and I was ready to take on some new challenges and adventures for myself.  That’s how it works.  We say goodbye and hello at the same time.  That is life.  There is such a sweetness to its delicacy and how relative it all is to whatever course you have been on.  And I wouldn’t want it any other way.

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