Living Inside The Vulnerable in the without and with the new
“When it was up to you, you left it up to me.” Indigo Girls
I used to have that line on my checks right above the memo line… like 30 years ago and for at least the following two decades.
It was a reminder to me to remember to hold onto my power, especially when it’s not my choice. I’ve lived with those words for years. In relationships, in my career, in parenting, in life… and this year, I’ve left it up to me. After losing everything.
This holiday, I want to stay in the space of incredible gratitude.
And doing that is also hard. It’s still an extremely difficult year facing life in the without.
Inside the fuckery, the consequences, the taking… the losing. It’s not easy by any means, but there is still gratitude. And that gratitude for me comes from taking back my power finally seeing the world again. I sat frozen for a long time. A good friend asked me recently why I keep referring to myself as broken. She told me she doesn’t see me as broken at all. She sees me as healing. Living. Loving. Laughing. And working.
This past spring, I looked at two of my children—the only ones I had left after losing my oldest’s final childhood years to mental health—and I told them to give me a year. Before I grew large expectations of myself, I needed to heal the holes of abandonment, love left behind. We’d all look back after a year to see how far we’ve come. This battle for all of us to heal from several traumas all at once has been the most difficult thing I’ve carried my children through in their lifetimes. And I know I can say I’m not always carrying them—sometimes they carry me.
I lost my daughter on the same day I lost my partner. The week before, the three of us sat together on the floor as we said goodbye to the Saint Bernard I brought home more than ten years ago. Since the happening and the tsunami of emotions that followed, my basement flooded three times, ruining everything and costing me tens of thousands in damage; I had a plague of bees I tried for months to save; I lost a queen palm tree in my yard that towered over me as if waiting to tumble onto my shattered heart and finally take me and my house down, and I stumbled and tumbled and dusted myself off and got up again. And again.
Staying inside gratitude has been a most difficult task for me.
Piles of mail sat on my kitchen counter for months with a name that only made me cry. My responsibility. Not my choice. When it was up to you, you left it up to me.
A new life formed away from me while her clothes still hung in my closet and her Waterpik sat on my bathroom counter, only a memory of what was and what occurred inside the happening when it was no longer up to me. My house looked like she was away on vacation while she explored options with a woman who cuddled with her on my couch in front of me just weeks before.
One of the most difficult things outside the immense loss and the weight of the loud emptiness was realizing who cared to reach out to me. Just to see how I was doing. I can count them on about four fingers. I asked early on for no one to choose sides because there was no inciting incident. There was no true happening. There was just loss. Simply a choice… not up to me. And no one chose. Not me, at least.
I slowly realized as hard as it was to not talk about it with mutual friends, their silence was just as deafening as the lack of rhyme or reason for her choice to leave us all amid family crisis, without a single thought of the promise of forever, or the gifts love had given us for years. To have the difficult conversations. I kept thinking anyone who supports someone walking out of their family like this can fuck off… and as much as I’ve wanted to say that (as much as I just did say that), I’ve focused my time, energy, and love on me, one doing the hard work, and on building a tribe that loves me and appreciates me exactly where I am. I’ve focused my energy on gratitude. I write a lot about the fuckery, the most fuckingest shit ever… but I am grateful for many things, including my own strength, especially for the days I tried not to wake.
Still sitting among pickles and peppers, I’ve slowly come to realize her space was hers, and as selfish as it was to not share with me, as heartbreaking as it was to continue the facade of family while love snuggled in elsewhere, this is what trauma looks like — and it was brought into our relationship too. Time has not cleared out my life… or her from my life. I’ve had no choice but to do that alone.
When I hit eight weeks, then twelve weeks, knowing and starting to date a new woman, I told her that we’d only known the woman who cuddled with my finance on my couch in front of me for that long before my relationship was in crisis. So I wasn’t prepared to make any choice in such a short time because it only took that long for my entire world to implode.
Not my choice. This was not my choice. I am here because… well, maybe because when it was up to me, I left it up to her. But when it was up to her to choose the promise she’d made to me and to our family, she simply took a few outfits and walked. I still don’t know how to reconcile this… because the gifts of gratitude and vulnerability hadn’t been mine for far longer than I knew, which puts forgiveness and anger back on my pile of fuckery to deal with inside my personal space of self-care and discovery.
I told this new love interest a few weeks ago I’d spent months telling her I was following some unwritten rules about not being ready to date, not wanting to put her heart at risk, and I spent months reminding her just how much this wasn’t up to me. Then a few weeks ago, I told her it is up to me. And I choose to live. And I choose her. Brené Brown taught me I can still work on me and live inside the vulnerable while growing love again… starting with loving myself.
“When it was up to you, you left it up to me.”
And I choose me… especially when you didn’t.
Gratitude isn’t always the same for everyone. I hate the path that brought me here. But I am blossoming again.
And I’m doing it wet and sloppy, hard and chiseled, weak and vulnerable, strong and stable, insecure and secure, on rocky terrain, in troubled waters that calm with the ebb and flow of acceptance and assurance that the two people I choose… myself and a new love… will stand strong in all of those things, even as they change from moment to moment, even as one of us is in one place while the other elsewhere. The difficult conversations we’ve had already have strengthened a friendship that blossomed before me long before I was willing to see it.
For everyone who lifted me this year, who held me, who let me be the most vulnerable, who cherished and protected my weaknesses as I empowered my strength to return, for those who listened to the stories about my daughter, for her who held me after every kiss and each moment of unique passion as I opened old wounds and relived them again and again wrapped in new arms of strength and affirmation, as I questioned allowing my children to make their own choices… for those who left it up to me… I am forever grateful for you. And I love you.
Living Inside the Vulnerable