Music at Midnight

 Well.  Here's the thing.  I am struggling with depression.  It's taken a bit for me to get to the point where I have enough oomph to work against it, but today I remembered "read the boys" (there should be a link here to The Blog I Accidentally Deleted, but there isn't, because I accidentally deleted it, but in that post I talk about 3 poets whose work often sustains me - Malcolm Guite, Stephen Berg, and John Blase) and so one thing led to another and then I found an email in which Malcolm recommended I read John Drury's book Music at Midnight if I wanted more insight into the work of George Herbert and so I went to Kindle and look, look what I found in the introduction to the book!

In another walk to Salisbury he saw a poor man with a poorer horse that was fallen under his load; they were both in distress, and needed present help, which Mr. Herbert perceiving, put off his canonical coat, and helped the poor man to unload, and after to load his horse. The poor man blessed him for it, and he blessed the poor man; and so was like the good Samaritan, that he gave him money to refresh both himself and his horse, and told him, that if he loved himself, he would be merciful to his beast. Thus he left the poor man, and at his coming to his musical friends at Salisbury, they began to wonder that Mr. George Herbert, who used to be so trim and clean, came into that company so soiled and discomposed; but he told them the occasion; and when one of the company told him he had disparaged himself by so dirty an employment, his answer was, that the thought of what he had done would provide to him music at midnight, and that the omission of it would have upbraided and made discourse in his conscience, whensover he would pass by that place. 'For if I be bound to pray for all that be in distress, I am sure that I am bound, so far as it is in my power, to practice what I pray for. And though I do not wish for the like occasion every day, yet let me tell you, I would not willingly pass one day of my life without comforting a sad soul, or showing mercy; and I praise God for the occasion. And now let's tune our instruments.'

- From The Life of Mr George Herbert.by Izaak Walton, 1670.

Music at midnight. Let's all do that. Let's all make the choices that provide for us music at midnight.

"And the light that's lost within us reaches the sky" (Jackson Browne)

 I've been listening to Jackson Browne's Before The Deluge over and over and over again and while there are many lovely lovely phrases, I've been at a bit of a loss as to exactly why the song resonates with me as much as it does.  It's by no means a new song but it's new to me.

Today, some clarity. The mental health journey is arduous and has been particularly difficult the past few months.  October is usually fairly awful, and it was worse than usual this year. The struggle started earlier and was much more intense, and then the reprieve of November came but pretty early in November, the struggle changed and became more difficult, in ways it hasn't been difficult for a really long time.

So it's been ...dark. Dark and wearying and kind of lonely and horrifying and today I found myself singing along with "the light's that lost within us" and instead I sang "...and the light that's locked within us reaches the sky" and that, THAT, that right there is what I will strive for until my dying breath ...

By the Light, by the power of that Light, the light that's locked within me will break forth and blaze and not just reach the sky, but transcend it.

Your past is not a template for your future.

 So many times, I hear myself telling people these things:

    Your history is not a template for your future.

    Your parents are not a template for who you are.

    You have choices.  You have the power to choose.  Awareness is a gift.

I believe these things, truly, strongly, deeply. I believe that we have the power to make different choices than our parents made, even the power to make choices that are different from the ones we ourselves have made in the past.

This week I came face to face with my own template and it was oh, so tempting, to surrender to it.  There's safety in patterns, even in the ones that make us hate ourselves.

School has been tough this semester. I'm tired of isolation, of uncertainty, of not having quite enough money, of being lonely and overweight and schoolwork has been very difficult to force myself to do. One of the professors I took several courses from in my undergrad degree said "Every time you choose not to quit is an act of healing."  

Because that was my pattern.  Big plans, big ideas, big dreams, or even small dreams, dreams as small as "I will do my homework early and thoroughly" ...I started out well and finished poorly.  I remember being highly insulted in high school when one of my teachers berated me (and a few others) in front of the entire class for not working to my potential.  (Now that's an interesting thing to find insulting - how dare he call me smart??)  

I took a year of university shortly after high school.  I failed one course, dropped another, passed English and Psych.  This became my template:  I don't finish what I start.  I have no ability to follow through, to finish well.  (Never mind that in my late 20's I successfully completed a diploma in Business Related Computer Programming at NAIT while working full time...that's the thing about templates, sometimes - we form them early, and then we ignore all evidence to the contrary.)

For years, actually decades, I did not go back to university even though I dearly longed for a degree in English because "I don't finish what I start."  I did not go back to school six or seven years ago (time is flying, y'all.  I don't remember exactly how long ago now!) planning to get a degree.  I went back thinking "well I'll take a course and see what happens." I was pretty sure I knew what would happen but -  somehow, by doing the next thing, and finishing what I started on however small a scale (a reading, an assignment, and lo and behold, a course and then another course) - I got a Bachelor's degree.  And nobody was more shocked than I was to find myself pursuing a Master's degree.

Fast forward to this semester when I am farther behind than I have ever been, in more than one course ...for one brief half hour yesterday, I came face to face with the template. Everything made so much sense.  I'd been looking at too small a picture, but looking at the big picture?  The journey that started  six or seven years ago that led me to this moment?  This was going to be the moment that matched the template. I may as well stop fighting it. I don't finish what I start. This will never not be true.

Thankfully I also believe you don't have to believe everything you think, and I'm sitting writing this instead of an essay (which I will go back in a few minutes) because I want to blog this, and then post a link on Facebook, and then at least once a year, I can remind myself:

YOUR PAST IS NOT A TEMPLATE.

And if my past isn't a template?  Neither is yours.

Just for the last line of the quote ...

From "I Will Not Let You Go Except Thou Bless Me" an essay included in Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen/Karen Blixen

Sometimes a cool, colourless day in the months after the rainy season calls back the time of the marka mbaya, the bad year, the time of the drought. In those days the Kikuyu used to graze their cows round my house, and a boy amongst them who had a flute, from time to time played a short tune on it. When I have heard this tune again, it has recalled in one single moment all our anguish and despair of the past. It has got the salt taste of tears in it. But at the same time I found in the tune, unexpectedly surprisingly, a vigour, a curious sweetness, a song. Had those hard times really had all these in them? There was youth in us then, a wild hope. It was during those long days that we were all of us merged into a unity, so that on another planet we shall recognise one another, and the things cry to each other, the cuckoo clock and my books to the lean-fleshed cows on the lawn and the sorrowful old Kikuyus: “You also were there. You also were part of the Ngong farm.” That bad time blessed us and went away.

That bad time blessed us, and went away.

I am counting on this.

Mother's Day

Every year when the commercials start coming out "Here's what Mom wants!" I have a complicated anti-reaction to it.  I was going to blog about it but a) I don't blog anymore and b) I already have, at least twice, and the writer in me likes to whine about not doing the same thing AGAIN and the internal editor likes to point out that I did it MUCH BETTER last time so this morning I went and found those two blog posts in my (incomplete digital) archives and here they are, for your reviewing pleasure.

From May 12, 2013:

Mother's Day.

I used to cry in church, every Mother's Day, because I wanted children so badly, and I was barren.  And then I would look around me and think everyone knew why I was crying, and I would cry harder.  (Why on earth I forced myself to go to church on Mother's Day, I will never know.  God wouldn't have minded.  I know that now.)

Several years ago, when my own invisible, unknown-even-to-me demons were making my parenting hard on everyone in my household, I found myself approaching Mother's Day with an astonishing measure of self-pity.  When I caught myself thinking "well they probably won't get me anything anyway", I was finally appalled enough at myself to snap out of it.  Since that year, this is what Mother's Day has meant to me:

Today is the day that I say "Thank you, God, that I get to be a mother, after all."  I hope I cry in church today, out of gratitude for these two incredible fascinating funny smart athletic interesting people that live in our house with us.  They're tall and lean and brown and fit and they have great hair and both of them have great senses of humour, in very different ways.  They are both capable of great kindness, and I love being with them.

Today, especially this year, is also the day that I celebrate the fact that my own mother is still "this side of heaven."  I will say this, too, because she would say it as well, that she is mothering me more at this stage in my life, while I am enduring an absolute storm of recall of repressed memories of severe, sustained abuse, than she ever has.  As horrible as the stories I have to tell are, and as heartbreaking as they must be to her, because the perpetrators of my worst abuses were not unknown to her, she has never once doubted me, never once faltered in her absolute resolve to be strong for me.

The gift I want today, on top of those? as if a person should need any more than that?

A picture of three of them together, these extravagant graces in my life, a memento to mark this moment in time. 

And from May 15, 2018:

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone when I say Mother's Day has been a problematic day for me.  Likely when I was younger and mostly did As Expected (beyond one cranky day in grade five where I got tired of always being called a brain and the teacher said "remember to pay attention to the ..(I forget what letter).." before she gave us a spelling test, and so I deliberately spelled them all wrong ...) I bought the requisite gifts and cards and there may even have been breakfasts served in bed.

And then I got older and moved away and got married and started to realize that all those complicated conflicting feelings I had about my mother were actually justified and also not my fault, and I went through the motions without actually meaning much of it.

And then we started trying to conceive, and there were at least a dozen years where being in church on Mother's Day was pure torture.  And then the children came along and for a few years, when they were tiny and compliant, Mother's Day was deeply satisfying.  And then they got older and I wasn't being the magical sort of infinitely patient mother I had fully planned to be and things weren't looking a lot like the imagined life I had planned and then more things and other things and about five years ago, as I was feeling slighted on Mother's Day, I realized I didn't ever want another day like that.  And I changed my perspective, and I remembered all those years I'd cried in church on Mother's Day because I wanted a CHILD, ANY CHILD.  I also remembered how far short of my personal goals my own performance as a mother had turned out to be, and I cut my mother some slack. (It helps that my mother, who used to lose her temper on an hourly basis, somehow (God) became a woman who has almost completely lost her ability to lose her temper.)

I decided that Mother's Day was going to be my own personal thanksgiving day - Thank you God for these amazing kids.  Thank you God that despite all kinds of trauma, (mine, hers, known, unknown), my mother and I have a relationship that is even often satisfying to both of us.

This year I've added a realization.  My mother was in the hospital, and she was very very ill and the doctor was of the experienced opinion that she would die, and then she started to get better.  And as she got better but still not that great, she got petulant and mouthy and I was the brunt of most of it.  And when I say most of it, it was only three incidences in eight days, but it wounded me deeply and it took me a week of doing nothing but knitting and Netflix to get over the emotional shell shock.

But I realized that I still love her.  I grew up terrified of her and I still love her.  She is so much more at peace than she ever was when I was growing up, and things are SO different now that loving her is a lot easier - she's kind of sassy and funny and I don't have to tiptoe, much, but that's actually beside the point.

The point is I love her because she raised me.  There's a lot of us out there with similar upbringings, and some of us have relationshoips with our mothers and some of us don't, but I want to say this, to MOTHERS -

This is a relationship where we need to be intentional, because we occupy the spot labelled "mother" in someone else's life.  What fills that spot is something your child will carry with them their entire lives, and it will forever inform who they are.

Can we please be careful with our babies, our toddlers, our teens, our adult kids?  Can we make what occupies that spot fragrant and not frustrating?  (As our children age, I think we need to be intentional about listening more than we talk but that's likely another whole blog post.)

I want there to be a better summing-up sentence than this but it's all I have.

***

Too long for a Facebook status update

Today was the last day of classes of my Bachelor's degree. I took so long to get there, and now it's almost over. It's a bittersweet day.
And in my Inbox this morning, from the daily dose of Frederick Buechner I subscribe to, was this gem.

Be Alive

YOU ARE SEEING everything for the last time, and everything you see is gilded with goodbyes. The child's hand like a starfish on the pillow, your hand on the doorknob. Caught between screen and window, a wasp unfolds one wing. With a sick smile, guilt-ridden, the old dachshund lurches off the forbidden couch when you come through the door, his nose dry with sleep, and makes for the pillow by the hot-air register. It is the room where for years Christmases have happened, snow falling so thick by the window that sometimes it has started to snow in the room, brightness falling on tables, books, chairs, the gaudy tree in the corner, a family sitting there snowmen, snowbound, snowblind to the crazy passing of what they think will never pass. And today now everything will pass because it is the last day. For the last time you are seeing this rain fall and in your mind that snow, this child asleep, this cat. For the last time you are hearing this house come alive because you who are part of its life have come alive. All the unkept promises if they are ever to be kept have to be kept today. All the unspoken words if you do not speak them today will never be spoken. The people, the ones you love and the ones who bore you to death, all the life you have in you to live with them, if you do not live it with them today will never be lived. It is the first day because it has never been before and the last day because it will never be again. Be alive if you can all through this day today of your life. What's to be done? What's to be done? Follow your feet. Put on the coffee. Start the orange juice, the bacon, the toast. Then go wake up your children and your wife. Think about the work of your hands, the book that of all conceivable things you have chosen to add to the world's pain. Live in the needs of the day. -Originally published in The Alphabet of Grace

So that was lovely

I keep thinking I'm going to blog stuff and then I don't, but then this thing happened and it was too long for a Facebook post …

A tiny bit of backstory, since I haven't blogged since sometime in the spring …

It's been pretty stressful here in our house, what with an incredibly busy semester for me coupled with Brad suddenly becoming unemployed and plunging into a deep depression two days before the semester started, added to the fact that there's been quite a lot of mental illness flare up on my part.  (One day this semester I realized that instead of using knitting to ground myself, I was stabbing the ball of yarn over and over again with the knitting needles …in class.)

Thursday I hit meltdown.  I spent a lot of the day ugly-crying and by evening had worked myself into the worst asthma attack I've had in a very long time.  Because my asthma symptoms are atypical, presenting with pain between the shoulder blades, if I can't get it under control with inhalers, I have to go to the ER to make sure I'm not having a heart attack, as pain between the shoulder blades is a common symptom of heart attack in women.

So that's the backstory to this lovely story, which is indeed lovely.  I went in and over the several hours that I was there, they ruled out heart attack and blood clot and chest infection but were not pleased with the fact that my blood pressure was rising and did not seem to be lowering at all.  At some point, several hours into the process, I realized that Brad was actually allowed to be hanging out in the back with me, so I went and fetched him from the waiting room and we held hands for at least an hour and when they came to take to my blood pressure again -  seriously. this is so lovely -

It was close to normal.