Tag: transformation

Friends for All Seasons

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“A friend accepts us as we are yet helps us be what we should.” – unknow

I hosted a birthday brunch for my friend this past weekend. It was all great – my kids worked super hard to color the wrapping paper for gifts, set the table and make signs, I cooked and cleaned for a day in order to have friends over to our house which doesn’t happen much in this COVID era. It was all great — except my friend didn’t show up.

She sent her husband to come alone because she was throwing up from a bad oyster that she’d eaten the night before at a wedding for someone she barely knows but felt like she had to go. She didn’t call or text because I’m guessing she thought it was sufficient that he would let us know. Which he did and the disappointment meant I spent the first five minutes of the party holding my daughter as she cried.

So, I’m upset with my friend. Obviously not for being sick but because this is about the 20th example (and most dramatic) of how she hasn’t shown up for us literally and figuratively since she took a new job 6 months ago. At first I was all grace and understanding but by now my grace pool has been diminished to the point that I’m out of empathy at the time when she really was sick. I’m tired of watching her seeming to try to be best friends with all of her new co-workers and in so doing, impacting her existing relationships and her ability to care for herself.

I spent the whole rest of the weekend brooding about this. I didn’t want to gossip so I kept it to myself and it simmered under the surface. Until I was finally ready to deal with it yesterday. As irked as I was, I couldn’t sit and meditate about this so I tried a walking meditation.

When I’d bled enough energy off so that I could get some space from the hurt of it, I realized this isn’t about me. My friend appears to be undergoing a transformation in her life and from my experience transformations are often messy, painful and not well communicated. From my experience, it’s like being in a washing machine just trying to find out which way is up while hopefully something gets clean.

I suppose we can all give up on each other as we transform and I’m sure we give each other plenty of excuses to bail. But that’s when we need each other most, even if just hold space for each other and occasionally shout “this way is up.” Perhaps my friend and I will end up on the other side of this with not enough common ground to be close and that will be okay. But I know that for my friends that have stood with me through the messy transformations, we have a deeper relationship as we’ve been friends through all seasons.

All of this makes me wonder – maybe the one small step in making the world a more peaceful place is holding space for others as they change?

The Lightening Rod for Big Feelings

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“The best way out is always through.” – Robert Frost

It’s my sister-in-law’s last day of nannying for me. The kids are aware of it but since they live so much in the now, it’s not as much that they focus on that information but the air is crackling with change and they sense it. It reminds me of the song my daughter sings about lightning: “Electricity gathers in a cloud, When frozen rain and bits of ice are bumping all around, Electricity leaping towards the ground, Lightning is the flash of light, Thunder is its sound.”

Just like with thunder storms, that energy has to go somewhere and in most cases, I find that I’m the lightening rod for my kids. They’ve bravely keep their little selves together until they see me and then it all comes bursting out. Lightning rods work because they draw the strike and then are wired to ground so that the energy is discharged safely into the earth. If a lightning rod is not wired to the ground, it provides no added protection to the structure.

I’m the conduit for my family’s emotion because my kids aren’t old enough to process many of the big feelings that come along with trying, getting hurt and having little control over the circumstances of life. And it’s not just kids that bleed off their pain and uncertainty. But to be the safe place for someone else’s emotions without endangering ourselves, we have to be connected to the ground. The danger of not being is that the electricity stays within us, causing damage to our organs, flashing out somewhere else unexpectedly or perhaps worst of all, building up until it’s a layer of charge that buffers our enjoyment of life. Completing the analogy, if we aren’t grounded we will not provide any added protection to the structure.

As with so much in parenting, I do much better with big feelings and changes if I take care of myself so I find myself continually working on my grounding. All week I have been getting up extra early, meditating to find that awareness that is bigger than my fear of the unknown, writing to process it all, and lying on the ground, ostensibly to stretch but even more to remind myself that there are many things that hold me up as life shifts. Leaning in towards the raw power of transformation and change, I find my center that is there through it all.