Speed. I am speed. Oh Cars, what a great catch phrase. I
think this has been my theme for years now, ever since I had kids. I seem to
only have sped up my life as the boys have gotten older. I have major FOMO.
There are so many books to read, there are so many fun kids’ activities to
register for, there are too many things to do. And on. And on. And on. I even
listen to my podcasts on 1.5 speed because regular speed is too slow.
Frankly it’s hard to enjoy things when you are trying to
cram everything into just 24 hours. The pressure I put on myself to constantly
go-go-go is crushing. My head is spinning and my to-do list is growing by the
minute. There is always something I could be doing. What’s ironic is that while
I am always rushing about, I am almost always late these days. I am always
trying to squeeze in that last load of laundry, wash the last dish, read the
last chapter, go for 5 more minutes on the elliptical, dash to the one last
errand. My attempt at being fast only makes me look slow because I try to do
one more thing before it’s time to go.
To drive home the point (no pun intended), I got the mail one
day this summer and lo and behold there were a couple of envelopes for me - not
one but two speeding tickets, both issued in one week, a day apart, by the
goddamn traffic cameras. After a long fuck-filled rant about the traffic
cameras, the idiocy of having a 25-mph section in the middle of town where it
should be 35 mph, and a strong case for “if an actual cop had pulled me over
the first time, I wouldn’t have been speeding for the second ticket,” I had to
face the facts. I had to slow down.
Oh my gosh, I really hate slowing down. Slowing down means I
won’t get everything done. It means that people will be doing things I could be
doing but I’m not. It means other people who are better people than I am can
keep up the pace while I cannot. And most importantly it means I may have to
listen to the garbage that is inside my head instead of trying to out run it.
After 41 years, you would think I would know my tells. You
would think I would know that if I keep adding things to my to-do list and
making each weekend bigger and better, and baking from scratch at 5 a.m. and
not sleeping and over committing, and hating myself for not keeping up, that it
is a sign that I’m trying to dodge something real that is happening inside my
heart.
Oh that heart. I don’t ever talk about it because to talk
about my heart means that my head has lost the battle. I am so good at putting
on that stone-cold warrior face, icing over my heart and preparing for the war that
life can be, smiling when I feel like sighing. And I’m going to be honest with
you. My heart broke this year. Broke. My head couldn’t save it. It tried and
denied for so long, but in the end, the heart won. Which means my head lost.
And I am admitting to you that I am hurt. I am injured. I am down.
I have always struggled to give emotion space in my life. I
don’t like to feel. But this time? There wasn’t a choice. Talk about humbling.
My heart said, nope, you can’t escape this time. This time none of my old ways of
avoiding emotion worked. This time I had to go through the fire instead of
above, around and under. There was just no other way except to experience it.
And that hurts. And hurting sucks.
If I slow down, what is going to happen? I am going to
experience the pain of heartbreak. The fear of the unknown. The anger of the
unjust. It is downright scary my friends. And yet, if I slow down and stop and look
around, all of these feelings are a sign that I am alive. I have survived another
day. I may not have always felt like a warrior, but I am still breathing and my
heart is somehow still beating. And some days, that is an accomplishment to be
proud of.
I’m trying really hard to stop adding things to my to-do
list because I know that I am simply trying to sprint from something that can’t
be outrun. All during winter break, I did not cut up the weekly fruit tray
(sounds crazy but I feel the need to always have fresh cut fruit at the ready
because that’s what “good moms do.”) I read books – predictable ones that
didn’t require a lot of mental work. I just sat around and talked to my kids.
And when my brain was tired and my heart needed a break, we watched Netflix and
you know what? It was fine. The walls did not come crashing down. We ate apples
(what no strawberries and kiwi?) and I got through the second season of the
Ozarks.
This year my theme is Healing. I’ve got a lot of healing to
do and part of that healing means I have to stop trying to outrun the tough
stuff with an endless to-do list and instead just experience it. Healing for me
means resting and honoring what a battle I’ve been through. Healing means
sleeping when I am tired and moving my body simply to feel good, not because I
ate three cookies that might have been still frozen because I couldn’t wait.
Healing is rediscovering who I am when others aren’t imposing their opinions on
me. Healing means dreaming again and smiling again and enjoying those small
moments with my kids when we are all laughing so hard we can’t breath and
someone has to get the Squirrel’s inhaler because he’s laughed himself into an
asthma attack. And those moments can’t come when I am working through a to-do
list or volunteering to chair some event because “we need everyone to
overcommit.” (Ok, so that's not what the say in the email but you know it's implied.)
So the homemade baked goods will be baked when I feel like
it. And I’ll sit down and read too during the Squirrel’s daily 20 minutes of
reading. Dinner and laundry can wait 20 minutes. And the Moose and I will just
hang out doing nothing in particular long enough that he will actually share
something about his teenaged day. And slowly slowly I’ll find myself again.
Because good things come slowly. And my future is going to be full of good
things.
“Listen – are you breathing just a little and calling it a life?” – Mary Oliver
