Lucia’s learning how to distinguish emotions: happy, sad,
mad, etc. When she watches cartoons, she turns to me and tells me what the she
thinks the characters are feeling and asks me to confirm her interpretation. Sometimes, I have
to explain why they’re feeling that way.
Last night, in the middle of slumber, she woke me up,
apparently from a bad dream. She said in a tiny voice, “Momma? I’m afraid.” She’s heard that phrase countless times from Marie, one of the kittens from The Aristocats, and so she said it in exactly the same way Marie said it. She nestled into my
arms (which is what Marie also did to her Momma) and I taco shelled her the rest of the night.
I woke up this morning rather abruptly from a text message and
I hate it when that happens. But when I woke up, I saw that she was still nestled in my
arms, her face pressed against my chest. She stirred a bit and rubbed her nose
in the space between my collarbones.
But I wanted to tell her myself, “Lucia? I’m
afraid.”
It’s been a rather bad week for personal reasons, and now as
July ends and August begins, I am filled with even more dread. August last year
was when things started to unravel and spin out of control, the month when I
finally went to the hospital. And no matter how far I think I’ve come, I am
now reminded that what I hurdled over was but a mere boulder; the rest of
the mountain still beckons.
God? I’m afraid. Very afraid. And now it is becoming more
apparent that despite best efforts, I am still going to go about this alone (on
some level, on a very important level).
Abandoned. That is the predominant feeling this week, an
emotion that I hope Lucia won’t be feeling for a very long time yet.
God? I need to be taco shelled. Because I feel very afraid and
very alone.
These "anniversaries" (someone needs to come up with a good word for those opposite-of-happy milestones) are hard, and so hard to verbalize, especially to people whose love for you is inextricably linked to their need for you to be okay...and so if we don't talk about it, somehow they are protecting you from the darkness, the true nature of which they will never completely understand.
ReplyDeleteSorry, just going to sleep and so I know this is random.
Oh, but you hit the nail right on the head.
DeleteI've been told to move on and not look back. And I know I should. But...I dunno.
Even this horrible past is a part of me now. It's hard to explain, but...in a way, I hang on to all that in the hopes that one day, the life I will have been living will be an homage to that horrible past. That some day, I will have come far enough to just look back without horror or shame or hurt and just say thank you.
Right...the whole thing of who we are being a sum of all of our experiences. I like to think that it gets easier from a distance. Trite example: when I was a kid, my parents would not drive me places, as some of my friend's parents were wont to do (I grew up a long, long time ago, when people would allow their children to wander, LOL). Resented it then, but had I not been shaped by that, I would not be the kind of person who could move to Grand Rapids without a car, back when the busses stopped at 6pm and didn't run on Sundays. What seemed crappy at the time made a whole range of life experiences possible.
ReplyDeleteIt's easier, of course, to apply this to walking almost a mile to the public library than it is to apply it to the more significant scars...
And re: your most recent post, which is what brought me back here (from Facebook) and remembering that you had mentioned replying to my comment, I think of two things: Psalm 118:17, and the line from the book Pierre that says "He rubbed his eyes and scratched his head, and laughed because he wasn't dead".
I want to believe that the day will come for all of us where we will be able to laugh because we aren't dead...
I'm hoping every breath we take will be a "hyuk" in that direction. :)
DeleteThanks for understanding, Lorraine.