Jan

All is Well.

I’m a sucker for a new year. I’m also a big resolution maker, even if, more often than not, I don’t end up keeping them. There’s just something about that sleepy week between Christmas and New Year’s – the quiet time to dream and plan, the calendar full of unblemished days – that fills me with hope. For a brief time, I recover the feeling (growing more elusive with each passing year) that anything is possible.

I started writing a New Year’s post for this blog at least half a dozen times, only to cast each one aside because it felt dishonest, or I wasn’t sure what I was trying to say. I tried to write a sort of 2022 year-in-review retrospective, but it just made me tired. 2022 was a tiring year. And anyway, now that we’re six days into 2023, I really think it’s time to look forward rather than back, don’t you?

Recently, I had a session with an intuitive healer, for help with low-grade anxiety that has become increasingly unmanageable. In the session, the healer (Whitney) told me that I’ve been traveling with unconscious fear my whole life. That worrying is, in fact, my comfort zone. As soon as I heard her say it, I knew it was true. Worrying about the future is the way I try to control it. As in, if I worry about something it either: a) won’t happen or b.) won’t blindside me when it does.

But the worrying has reached a tipping point. Not only is trying to control the future a pointless exercise, but it has left me totally unable to enjoy the present moment. Even when things are good, I can’t relax, because I’m always bracing for some inevitable disaster. It’s exhausting, and I hate it.

I’m desperate to unlearn this lifelong pattern, but I know it won’t be easy. Whitney suggested a sort of “fake it til I make it” approach: whenever I start worrying, I simply repeat the phrase “All is Well” as many times as I need to until I feel better. Even if I don’t believe it, over time, the simple repetition of “All is Well” will have the power to reprogram my brain’s default that nothing is well. At least, that’s the hope.

On New Year’s Eve, I decided to choose a word to be my theme for 2023. I just closed my eyes and picked the first word that came to mind. That word was “Trust.”

It turns out that “Trust” is a nice companion to “All is Well.” Here’s how it works: this year, I’m going to trust that my life is unfolding as it is meant to. I’m going to trust that it’s not too late for me, that I’m not falling behind on some imaginary timeline. I’m going to trust in my ability to handle whatever’s coming down the road. And most importantly, I’m going to trust the intuitive voice that says, “This is right” and “This is wrong.”

If I think about it, that intuitive voice has been a reliable guide, when I’m brave enough to listen to her. She helped me leap into the unknown and take some big scary risks in my life, including turning down a “safe” corporate job that was totally wrong for me, moving to New York City after eighteen years (!) in Los Angeles, and going back to school for a master’s degree at the age of thirty-nine.

Normally, I approach each new year with a whole host of resolutions. Big plans, big dreams, big goals for the year ahead. And while there are still some important things I’d like to check off my bucket list, I also recognize that this sort of obsessive planning is just another way of trying to control the future. So, this year I’m trying something different. This year my only resolution is that one word: Trust. I will breathe it in and out like a mantra, letting it carry me through every big decision, every moment of uncertainty. Trusting – even if it means I have to fake it til I make it – that All is Well.

Happy New Year, friends.

5 months ago Short URL 14 Comments

Change/Healing/Health/Mental Health/Well-Being

All is well/Anxiety/Extra Dry Martini/Healing/Mental Health/New Year/New Year's Resolutions/Sarah Kelly/Trust

Apr

Canceled.

It was Thursday, March 12th. The last day of winter quarter at Savannah College of Art and Design. I was bleary-eyed from lack of sleep but full of adrenaline, racing to finish one last assignment and get it uploaded to an online discussion board before my eleven AM class. A stack of essays marked with my scribbled comments sat beside my backpack, waiting to be shoveled inside.

And then the email came. I saw the white notification pop up on my iPhone screen, and before I read it, I knew. The heaviness that had been hanging in the air for the last several days settled onto my shoulders like a weight.

The message was short and to the point. It said simply:

Courses at all SCAD locations to be offered online only for spring quarter. More information to follow later today.

I just sat there, staring at my phone. Even though I’d been following the news reports about the coronavirus, up until that point it had still felt like something far away. Something I wasn’t quite sure how seriously I should be taking. After all, life in Savannah hadn’t changed that much. Tourists still flocked to the bars on River Street and filled in the old town squares. Celebrations for the week-long booze fest of St. Patrick’s Day had already begun, promising more drunken mayhem the closer we moved toward the holiday. The previous night, my boyfriend and I had met his aunt and uncle for dinner at The Olde Pink House, an upscale, multi-level restaurant in an elegant southern mansion. The mood was festive. Every table was full.

I was sitting in my morning class when the next email came. All in-person classes and public events during SCAD’s spring quarter, including graduation, were going to be canceled. Academic buildings, libraries, gyms, dining facilities, and most residence halls would be closed. Campus was effectively shutting down, effective immediately.

The rest of March 12th passed in a haze. I should have been happy: it was the end of the quarter, and I had made it through. I had made it through the first, grueling, ten weeks of graduate school. Instead, confusion ruled the day. Confusion and mild hysteria. The corridors of Arnold Hall were crammed with students huddled in corners and pushed up against windows, talking on their cell phones in hushed voices. Some students were visibly upset, some were crying. All of them wondering, “What now?”

My first class let out early, so I walked to a nearby cafe, sat at the bar, and ordered two tacos for lunch. Outside, the sky was bright blue, the weather warm. It didn’t feel like a global pandemic was on the horizon. I scrolled through the news on my phone and saw that the U.S. president had issued a travel ban to and from Europe, sending airports into chaos. More travel restrictions were imminent. I texted my friend Vim, in California. I had been planning to fly to Oakland the next day to visit him and his wife Sharon for my spring break. “Everything just got crazy here,” I wrote. “I’m not sure I should travel. I’ll call you later?”

By the time I got home, canceling spring break felt like the only logical thing to do. As I watched via cable news, events in the outside world began to change, and quickly. The San Francisco Bay Area issued a shelter in place order. Los Angeles and New York closed down their bars and restaurants. Meanwhile, in Savannah, my yoga studio stayed open, and tourists continued to take advantage of the city’s open container law, ordering cocktails to go and strolling down Broughton Street with plastic cups in hand. But time pressed on. The news turned darker. And little by little, Savannah started to catch up.

First, on March 19th, the mayor issued a state of emergency, closing public beaches, fitness centers, movie theaters, and all bars that didn’t serve food. Next came the official shelter in place order on March 24th, forcing all restaurants that hadn’t already closed to switch to takeout only, and effectively shutting down all non-essential businesses. Both of those orders were well behind those of the cities hardest hit by the pandemic, but still felt progressive compared to much of the rest of the south.

It has been three weeks since I received that initial email from SCAD. My extended, largely quarantined spring break is over, and my new, virtual, spring quarter has begun. Life looks a lot different than it did three weeks ago, and I’m not sure how to feel about that. My emotions swing wildly from day to day, and from moment to moment. There are worries about my west coast family and the friends I left behind in New York. There is gratitude for my spacious condo, and relief that I’m no longer living in a cramped Manhattan apartment at a time when everyone is shuttered inside. There is the alienation of living somewhere new, far away from most of the people I love, in a part of the country where the prevailing worldview is sharply different from my own. There is the aching for home and for the familiar. There is the claustrophobia of not knowing how long this quarantine will last.

And then there is anger. So much anger that frankly, it catches me by surprise. Some of my anger has been fueled by cable news, by watching elected officials play politics when they should be helping people and saving lives. But the large volume of corona-related content swirling around the internet is what has triggered me the most. Every day, my news feed is a barrage of essays and social media posts telling me about all the things I should be grateful for, all the ways I should be using my time productively, all the “virtual” experiences I should be having. Everywhere you look, there are too many people, with too much time on their hands, trying to spin this pandemic into a positive experience. It’s exhausting. It’s irritating as hell.

That might sound extreme. Negative. Mean-spirited, even. At first, I didn’t want to admit how genuinely ticked off I was by all the people insisting I take a glass is half full approach to this quarantine. But then I realized something: the anger I’m feeling is really grief.

It’s not the kind of grief I’m used to. Not the kind I’ve experienced before. I’m lucky enough to be able to say I don’t know anyone who has died from the coronavirus (and I hope that I never do). But all of this insistence on positive thinking reminds me of the worst, most unhelpful things people said to me after my parents died. Things like “there will be a silver lining to all of this,” and “everything happens for a reason.” For the record, the next time someone tells you “everything happens for a reason,” when something really shitty happens to you, you have my permission to punch them in the face.

There is no “right” way to feel right now. It’s weird and unfamiliar and scary as hell. And the scariest thing about it is the sheer number of questions we don’t have answers to. No one knows how long we’ll have to stay at home, or how many of us will get sick, or how many businesses and individuals will be financially decimated in the process. What will life look like when all of this is finally over? We simply don’t know.

Here’s what I do know: if you’re like most people, you’re probably grieving something right now. It might be something small, like a vacation you had to cancel. It might be something larger, like the loss of your job or your income. Or, you might be one of the millions of people struggling with depression, adrift and alone in this sea of self-isolation.

Whatever it is that you’re feeling, the important thing is not to judge yourself for feeling it. Yes, you can always find someone else who is struggling more, someone who has it worse than you during this time of crisis. But playing the comparison game is not helpful. We’ve all lost something in this pandemic. We’re all grieving something. And admitting the difficulty in that doesn’t make you a bad or a selfish person. It just makes you human.

So, do the things that bring you comfort. If you want to use this time to write the next great American novel, or learn another language, or get into the best shape of your life, go right ahead. But you don’t have to. You could also call a friend. Or go for a walk. Or simply get through the day.

I’ll be right here, getting through the day alongside you.

Until next time, friends.

3 years ago Short URL 12 Comments

Change/Grief/Mental Health/Savannah/Well-Being

Coronavirus/Covid 19/Extra Dry Martini/grief/Mental Health/Quarantine/Sarah Kelly/Savannah/SCAD

Sep

Seven years.

“Maybe it’s okay

if it takes time,

to be okay.

Maybe

healing is a road that is

lined with endless grace.”

– Morgan Harper Nichols

Dear Mom,

How do I begin? Usually, I’m the one other people come to when they need help figuring out what to say. But in trying to figure out what to say to you – my best friend, my first phone call, the person I miss most of all – I am utterly lost. My fingers are clumsy on my keyboard. A heavy brick sits squarely in the center of my chest.

But still, I will try. I will try because you deserve it. You deserve to know all of the things I have been thinking but haven’t been able to say.

Seven years. Seven years since I got the worst phone call of my life. Seven years since all the color bled from the world and the sky turned black and nothing would ever look the same again. Seven years since you left.

Seven is an impossible number. It is impossible for me to believe it has been seven years since I’ve seen your face, or hugged you in an airport, or heard the familiar, “Oh hi, Sar,” on the other end of the telephone.

But seven is an impossible number for another reason. It is impossible to believe how quickly the years have elapsed since you died. It seems so cruel that time has marched on, indifferent, and that I have lived and loved and struggled and succeeded and hoped and failed throughout most of my thirties without you. How unfair that the worst thing I could possibly imagine happened to me, and all I could do was survive it? How awful to learn that I not only could go on without you, but that I would go on. I would go on to become a better, braver, more compassionate person in your absence, and that better, braver, more compassionate person is someone you will never get to meet.

Damn it, it’s so unfair. And yet, it is. The unfairness of life is one of the most profound lessons I have learned from your death, Mom. As children, we are taught to believe that kindness will be rewarded and the good guys will win and that everything will work out in the end. And sometimes, those things do happen. But other times, they don’t. Other times, life shocks you with its randomness. Sometimes, terrible things happen that don’t make any sense and there’s nothing to do but accept them.

For a while, I was angry with you, Mom. I was angry with you for dying. I was angry with you for leaving me at the worst possible time. Dad was dying, and Grandma was losing her mind, and Grandpa was wheelchair-bound and depressed, and you just checked out. You left the building and left me to deal with the mess you left behind.

When you died, I was in the prime of my life. I was thirty-one, living a sun-soaked existence in Los Angeles, doing exactly as I pleased. Before you left, my biggest concerns centered around whether my agent liked my new headshots or how many auditions I was getting. And then suddenly, everything changed. Suddenly, there were a million hard decisions to make. There was probate court. There were health care directives and funerals to plan and boxes and boxes and boxes of belongings to sift through. There was a home to sell. My family home, or at least it used to be, before I watched you unravel within its walls. And then, there was Grandpa. Your sweet, heartbroken father, who could not reconcile the fact – no matter how many times I tried to explain it to him – that someone who was only sixty years old and in seemingly good health could suddenly just die.

It was relentlessly unfair, Mom. And I was not ready for any of it. In fact, for a while, I was convinced it would kill me. I was convinced that I would die. Yet, for whatever reason, I didn’t. Even though everything was horrible and gut-wrenching and wrong, I survived. And a funny thing happens when life deals you the worst cards you can imagine and you continue to breathe in and out. You learn something about yourself. The world is suddenly, irrevocably, different, and you are different in it. You can’t go back to the way you were, and you find you don’t want to.

I am going to say some things now that will probably sound awful, but I have to admit to them because they’re true. If both of my parents had to die, I’m glad you went first, Mom. Because my relationship with my father needed repairing and those last few months with him were a gift. I’m grateful for the dinners we had and the football games we watched and that there was nothing left unsaid between us. I’m grateful he got to plan his own funeral, and that I was able to carry his ashes down the aisle of the church, and sit in the front row with Deirdre and Dave and Matt and pretend to be the good Catholic girl he wanted me to be. If you hadn’t died, Mom, I wouldn’t have done any of that. I would have been too busy holding you up.

And even though I blamed her cruelty for causing you to turn to the bottle in the first place, I’m grateful for the daily phone calls with Grandma before Alzheimer’s erased her memory. I’m grateful for the realization that even though she was a terrible, abusive mother, she was still in pain over losing you. I’m grateful for the knowledge I learned earlier than most: that love is complicated and people are too, and most of us aren’t working with a full tool kit when it comes to matters of the heart.

I think you already know this, Mom, because I choose to believe that you see and know everything I do, but I will confess it to you anyway: I have lied about your death. I’m not sure how many times, but there is one time in particular that stands out. It was after we found out Grandpa was dying, and I was on a plane headed back to Seattle to be with him. The woman seated next to me was one of those busy body, Matriarch types, and before I knew it, I was telling her my entire life story. And when she asked me how you died, I lied and said “Cancer.”

It embarrasses me now that I did that, Mom. Why should I care what a complete stranger thinks? But at the time, I was trying to protect you. Or rather, I was trying to protect us both. I was afraid that if I told the truth, the busy body Matriarch seated next to me would think you were a terrible mother. Or I was a terrible daughter. Or there was something wrong with our family. Or – worst of all – you didn’t love me enough to stay alive.

I know that none of this is true, Mom. What is true is that for most of my life, you harbored a deep, dark sadness. A sadness I didn’t understand and didn’t know how to fix. And you drank to feel better, and the alcohol worked until it didn’t. Until it killed you. But I don’t think you wanted to die, Mom. I don’t think you wanted to leave us. As one of your friends once told me, “Your mother was so tired. She just wanted to sleep.”

Shortly after you died, the man I used to be married to told me he was jealous of our relationship. He said he was jealous of how close we were, because he didn’t have that with his own mother. His words caused me to fly into a blinding rage. I was so furious at the unfairness of losing you, so devastated by the gaping hole your absence had only recently carved into my life, that I simply couldn’t hear it. But looking back, I’m glad he said it, because he only illuminated what was true. In thirty-one years, I never doubted how much you loved me, Mom. Not once. You gave me everything you could, and I am the luckiest person on earth to be able to call you my mother. Nothing will ever change that. Not even death.

One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned in losing you, and in losing Dad, and Grandma and Grandpa, is that healing is a road that runs straight through forgiveness. In order to move on, you have to let go.

It has taken me seven years to be able to say this, but here it is: I forgive you, Mom. I forgive you for dying. I forgive you for leaving me at the worst possible time. I forgive you for needing to sleep.

And I forgive myself, too. I will have to say that again and again in order to believe it, so I guess I better start practicing now. I forgive myself. I forgive myself for not being able to save you. I forgive myself for every horrible, awful, selfish thing I did in the years since you died. I forgive myself for the mistakes I made, for the time and the money I wasted, and for all the ways I hurt myself. I forgive myself because I can see now that I was doing my best. I can see now that I was only trying to survive.

You stayed alive for me as long as you could, Mom. And now, it is my turn to stay alive for you. But I won’t just do that. I will do you one better. I will write the story of your life, and my life, and the story of all the ways in which our two lives are irrevocably intertwined. And as I do that, I will put this sad, seven-year season behind me and move forward into the future with a still-fragile yet hopeful heart. Because, do you want to hear something crazy? Even after everything that’s happened, I’m still an optimist. Even after all the evidence to the contrary, I still believe in happy endings. I still believe that people are good, and love is real, and we will be OK. And most of all, Mom, I believe that being your daughter is the greatest gift I could ever have asked for.

Thank you for being my mother.

I love you.

Sarah

4 years ago Short URL 12 Comments

Addiction/Family/Grief/Healing/Things My Mother Never Did

Alcoholism/Extra Dry Martini/Family/grief/Healing/Love/Mental Health/Mom/Morgan Harper Nichols/Sarah Kelly

Mar

Lucky.

If you are falling. . . dive.

We’re in a freefall into future.

We don’t know where we’re going.

Things are changing so fast, and always when you’re going through a long tunnel, anxiety comes along.

And all you have to do to transform your hell into a paradise

Is to turn your fall into a voluntary act.

It’s a very interesting shift of perspective and that’s all it is.

Joyful participation in the sorrows and everything changes.

– Joseph Campbell

You can feel the weather beginning to turn in New York. Even with the bitterly cold wind whipping off the Hudson River, even with a recent snowfall that caused – unnecessary – school closures, you can tell: it won’t be like this much longer. Warmer days are coming.

This winter has been my worst season in recent memory, which is not something I say lightly. I’m in a new apartment, renting a room one subway stop uptown from my former (glorious) Morningside Heights sublet. I feel lucky to have landed here. My room is spacious, the rent is – by Manhattan standards – affordable, and I’m able to go month to month without a long-term commitment. Without a job or the desire to sign a lease, this was my best option and I am grateful to have found it.

Still. Transitions are always difficult, aren’t they? I miss the reliable package delivery and in-building laundry and Black and Decker coffee maker of my old apartment. I miss the corner bodega where the old man behind the counter called me “sweetheart,” and the proximity to Morningside Park, and the fact that it took me half as much time as it does now to walk to the gym.

I’ll adjust. I’ll get used to this new place and find things to love about it that surprise me, just as I did with the old place. But in the middle of this transitional period, in the middle of what is still winter, there are other things going on. Hard things. Like an ongoing health condition that has left me anxious and depressed. I am struggling to accomplish the most basic of tasks, and then I get angry at myself for my lack of productivity. It’s a vicious cycle, one that makes me feel overwhelmed and vulnerable. And New York City is not a place where you want to feel vulnerable.

I’ve been through winters before, ones far worse than this one. And what I’ve learned through weathering those storms is that I have to be patient. Beating myself up or spiraling into negative self-talk about how awful I am doesn’t help me. Instead, I’m focusing on the small steps I am taking forward each day. I’m reminding myself to be grateful.

“No one moves to New York for the weather,” someone told me recently. That’s true. But this particular storm is not New York’s fault. What I can see after a year and a half of living here is that the place is not the problem. This place just exposes my problems. Because New York is a place where it’s impossible to hide.

So, after a too-long hiatus from this blog, I’m not hiding any more. I’m struggling and I’m being honest about it, while also acknowledging the fact that I know I’m luckier than most. I have a roof over my head and access to good doctors and a network of kind, caring friends who have been texting, and calling, and checking in. I have love in my life. And I have the knowledge that I have experienced far worse than this and have come out the other side, which gives me confidence that I will again. Because even the worst winters don’t last forever. And when spring comes, I’ll be here. I’ll be ready.

Until next time, friends.

4 years ago Short URL 9 Comments

Change/Mental Health/New York/Well-Being

Anxiety/Depression/Extra Dry Martini/Gratitude/Joseph Campbell/Life Lessons/Mental Health/New York City/Sarah Kelly

Apr

Her.

It was a Facebook “memory” that alerted me to the fact that I’d missed my grandmother’s death anniversary. I’d missed it by an entire week. I stared at my iPhone screen for a solid minute, wondering why a post from four years ago, in which I thanked friends for attending the opening weekend of a play festival that I co-produced, would trigger such heaviness in me. And then, suddenly, I knew. It was because I had written that post just one week after my grandmother died. The anniversary of her death had come and gone, and I had completely forgotten about it.

When the call came on that Saturday morning, April 13th, I didn’t answer it. There was only one reason that my eighty-six-year-old grandfather would be calling me. Ever since I had visited Grandma in the home for Alzheimer’s patients two months earlier, I had known that her end was near. Her decline was steep and rapid. She had gone from placing daily, mostly-lucid phone calls to me, to being wheelchair bound, her white blond hair tangled and swept off her face with plastic little girl barrettes, her pale blue eyes reflecting no recognition of me, all in the space of a few weeks.

I got into my car and replayed my grandfather’s message. “We’ve lost another one, Sar,” he said, his voice tired, resigned. I called him back, listened as he told me that he’d arrived at her nursing home too late to say goodbye. “I’m sorry,” I said. I told him I loved him, hung up the phone, and went to rehearsal. And I told no one – not one single, solitary person – what had happened. Not for weeks.

Looking back, I suppose the fact that I kept my grandmother’s death a secret from everyone who knew me was not particularly healthy. But at the time, my decision – at least to me – made perfect sense. I was one week out from opening a series of one-act plays, two of which I was acting in, another of which I was directing. I had a full-time job, one that I had only recently returned to after taking a leave when my father died. And it had only been seven months since the death of my mother, who had crawled inside of a vodka bottle (or more accurately, a liquor store’s worth of vodka bottles) on the heels of my father’s terminal cancer diagnosis. The space between the deaths of both of my parents had been less than five months, and I was tired. I had taken enough “bereavement” time. I wanted to get back to my life. I wanted to get back to work. And I had a show to open.

But four years later, I can finally admit that there’s another, darker reason why I never allowed myself to grieve my grandmother’s passing; why I don’t mourn her loss the way I’ve mourned the losses of my parents. My grandmother was not a nice person.

That’s what I’ll tell you when I’m feeling kind. What I’ll tell you when I’m feeling brutally honest is that my grandmother was an emotional terrorist. She was a serial abuser, one who reserved her worst brutality for those she claimed to love the most. I can’t count the number of times that, as a little girl, she brought me to tears by telling me something hateful about my parents. And she took immense pleasure in depositing my favorite stuffed animal, a ratty and well-loved St. Bernard I never slept without, into the trash. Her only “apology,” was to tell me I was better off without him, because he was “full of disease.”

As I got older, I got tougher. My grandmother lost the ability to make me cry. I fought back. I called her out. And the bullying stopped. But my mother? She wasn’t so lucky.

I’m glad that I’ll never know the full extent of the hell that my grandmother rained down on my sweet, emotionally sensitive mother. I know enough to know that she destroyed whatever fragile self-confidence she might have had. Even as a little girl, I remember the temper tantrums and smashed dishes, the screaming and shrieking, my grandmother accusing my Mom again and again of being a “horrible mother.” I remember the multiple “interventions,” with Mom and Grandpa raiding Grandma’s stockpile of prescription drugs and flushing them down the toilet, telling her, “Enough.”

And I know that my grandmother, who valued money and prestige above all else, forbade my Mom from pursuing the only thing she ever really dreamed of: becoming a professional tennis player. Mom – ever the dutiful daughter – obeyed, but deferring her dream was an event that changed the trajectory of her life. Even after she married my father and moved to Alaska, finally out from under her mother’s thumb, she never seemed to recover the gumption to go after her heart’s desire again.

As twisted and grotesque as it may sound, in some ways I feel “lucky” to have been born the daughter of a woman raised by an emotional abuser. My mother, never allowed to follow her own dreams, fiercely supported me in the pursuit of mine. Starved for affection by a woman who didn’t have a maternal bone in her body, my Mom showered me with love, making sure I always knew that I was the center of her universe. And spending years watching the person who I loved the most never believe that she was good enough had a profound effect on me, making me determined to live my life in all the ways that she couldn’t.

Part of me will always blame my grandmother for my mother’s death. I have no doubt that her relentless abuse is the reason my Mom sought solace in the bottle in the first place. But I also know that blaming her is too easy, that life – and human beings – are more complicated than that. My grandmother was sick for a long time, longer than any of us ever knew. And my mother had her own mental health issues, which she numbed with alcohol and refused to seek professional help for. Mental illness and addiction run rampant in my family, carrying with them a legacy of dysfunction, a legacy that I am determined not to repeat. Which is why, even though I know that this essay would have horrified my mother, I also knew that I had to write it.

Family is complicated. So is love. And I believe that people are capable of harboring two competing emotions within their bodies at the same time. For example, I can tell you that I loved my grandmother deeply, and yet most of the tears I’ve shed over her death were for myself, because I wished that she were different. I can tell you that as much as I admired my mother, I am terrified of ending up like her. And I can tell you that though I feel guilty about forgetting the anniversary of my grandmother’s death, I also wish that I didn’t have to remember it. I wish that April 13th was just another day on the calendar.

Until next time, friends.

6 years ago Short URL 100 Comments

Addiction/Family/Grief/Love/Mental Health/Things My Mother Never Did

Addiction/Breaking the Cycle/Emotional Abuse/Extra Dry Martini/Family/grief/Love/Mental Health/Sarah Kelly

Jan

Things my mother never did.

I think I know what’s wrong with me. No, that’s not true. I know I know what’s wrong with me. Or at least, I know one of the things that’s wrong with me. The Big Thing.

I have been putting off writing this, because the act of writing it, of putting it on paper, makes it a real thing. A real thing I can’t run away from, a real thing I’ve got to face. I’ve spent a lot of time over this last year 2014 alone; alone with myself and my thoughts, taking time and space – the likes of which I’d never allowed myself before – to process and to grieve a string of losses and difficult life events. And as 2014 drew to a close and I thought about the ways that I wanted 2015 to be different – and I want it to be different in just about every which way – I kept coming back to one thing: the truth must out. We are only as sick as our secrets, and until I start telling the truth about the darkness – difficult as it may be – the darkness is going to continue to own me.

So here goes. For as long as I can remember, I have been living with a tension between two powerful and conflicting emotions: anger and guilt. It wasn’t until the death of my mother two years ago and the subsequent unraveling of my nuclear family that I began to realize how profoundly this tension had been affecting me, how it had affected my entire life.

I am angry. I am angry with my mother. I have been angry with her for a very long time. You see, for most of my life, I was the parent, and she was the child. She was a fragile dove that needed to be protected, and she leaned on me to help her, to fix her, to save her. But I was never very good at it. I am angry with her because she knew that I was ill equipped to give her what she needed, but she insisted upon it anyway. I am angry with her because she set me up for failure.

And you would not believe the guilt that my anger produces, the way that it spins through my stomach like so much fire. The guilt is relentless. I am haunted because I think and feel such awful things about the person I loved more than anyone in this world. I am guilty for admitting these things, for saying them out loud. Guilty for being a horrible, selfish, ungrateful daughter. Guilty for not wanting to grow up to be like my mother, for – in point of fact – being terrified of growing up to be like her. And, most of all, guilty because I let her down when she needed me the most. Guilty because she died on my watch.

Guilt and anger are a potent enough cocktail, but when you mix in grief and regret it’s enough to knock you sideways. And it, that, is what has been keeping me stuck. I never wanted to be like my mother when she was alive, but now that she’s gone, I can’t seem to stop embodying her worst traits. The chronic anxiety, the depression, the self-isolation, the use of alcohol as a coping mechanism, the stubborn refusal to ask for help. My 2014 was a dark year awash with all of these things, and all of them – I can only assume – have been some sort of twisted, semi-conscious attempt on my part to keep her alive.

Please don’t misunderstand me: my mother was wonderful. She was kind and sweet and loving and generous. She was a much better person than I am. But she was always so unhappy. She wanted more from her life than what she got. She gave up on her first dream of becoming a professional tennis player because her parents didn’t support it and she wasn’t strong enough to stand up to them. She was never very happy as the office manager of my father’s law practice, but she was good at it and it gave her the flexibility to raise a young child (me). But I grew up, and dad closed the law firm, and there were still so many things that she wanted to do. She wanted to go back to school and pursue a master’s degree in psychology, she wanted to refine her (already impressive) culinary skills with additional classes, she wanted to volunteer for political campaigns and charitable organizations, she wanted to travel the world. More than anything, I think my mom wanted to feel that she had value. That she could make a contribution that was important, a contribution that other people would notice and appreciate. But she was paralyzed to take that first step. There was always tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. And as the years went by, I watched her put together a life built on deferred dreams, a life where she preferred to look back on the past with fond nostalgia, and a resignation that her best years were already behind her.

But here’s the thing about dreams. They don’t die quietly. Hers certainly didn’t. They tortured her with visions of a life un-lived and she stuffed them down and pushed them aside and put everyone else’s needs before her own and she drank to dull the sharp edges of pain and longing.

As she got sicker, the signs that had always been there – that I’d been too deep in denial to acknowledge because, in spite of the very personal resentments I’d harbored toward her, she was still my mother, and therefore, perfect – grew stark and outlined in thick edges. She had always lived with a bit of a disconnect between fantasy and reality (don’t we all?), but that disconnect turned borderline delusional. Her already small frame whittled away to nothing, her eyes turned hollow and vacant, she stopped making sense. I implored her to get help and her only response was to invent a therapist she was ‘seeing’ to get me off her back. (I know this because, well, Google. That, and she was a terrible liar.)

In the end, dying was the most purposeful thing that she’d done in years. She’d made up her mind that life wasn’t worth living anymore. She shunned all help. She shunned me. And she drank until she didn’t hurt anymore. She drank until she disappeared. And when she died, I started disappearing, too.

So here I am, two years after her death, still sitting at the cross streets of anger and guilt, streets intersected by avenues of grief and regret. It’s a four way stop full of monsters, and until now, my foot has been placed firmly on the brake pedal. And so, for this New Year 2015, I made a pact with myself. I’m going to start doing all of the things my mother never did. I’m going to do them actively, defiantly, and on purpose. Things like asking for help. Things like telling my truth, even if it’s uncomfortable or ‘inappropriate.’ Things like pushing myself out of my comfort zone and signing up for big, scary adventures. Things like not putting off my life. I’m going to take her mistakes and self-sabotage and heartache and unfulfilled dreams and use them as a road map to do the opposite, at Every. Single. Turn. And I’ve already started: I’m in the process of shopping for the most amazing therapist ever, I’m nearly two weeks into an thirty-day alcohol and sugar-free detox during which I’m digging in and focusing on my creative work, and soon, I’ll be leaving on a solo trip to Europe. And there are other things too. Things I’m not quite ready to talk about, but that are quietly, actively at work beneath the surface of my life.

Rejecting my mother’s life and her choices in such a cold and calculated fashion makes me feel like a malicious, rebellious child. And maybe that’s what I am. But at this point, after all of the darkness, after all of the self-sabotage and regret, making this choice sort of feels like life or death. Along the way, I hope that I can finally learn to let go of the anger, and forgive her. I hope that I can finally learn to let go of the guilt, and forgive myself.

It’s worth a shot.

Until next time, friends.