Owen is growing up. Changing. Evolving. And I am still playing with fairies and singing rhymes beneath a wide blue sky. There has been tension. Shane pointed this out to me and suggested I become interested in the things he's interested in. I scoffed, Pokemon/Bakugan/Comic Books/Video Games (all the things that he gets to do in Illinois), how can I muster interest in those. Then we found a dead phone. Now you might not initially expect a dead phone to provide common ground, but never underestimate the value of castoff electronics. I handed him a screw driver and asked if he wanted to take it apart. He did. He became ecstatic. LOOOOOOK at this mom, this is how it works, and this and this and this. He explored it for two days and I was genuinely excited and interested too. The magic of a common interest. Now I have to give up the "Brush your teeth/eat your breakfast/comb your hair/make your bed" mama diatribe and allow my son the space to create the man he is going to become. Oh letting go! It doesn't appear to be a mother's strong suit, perhaps that is why we are given so many opportunities to practice.
Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the
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