On the night of my birthday, I am lying in bed with my son so we can pray before he goes to sleep. Most nights, our prayers are focused on thankfulness, expressing our gratitude for something that day. Tonight, though, I suggest something else. “Let’s take turns praying for each other,” I say. “Tell me what you want me to pray for you and I’ll pray, then we’ll switch.”
He tells me his eight-year-old gratitudes, and I whisper words to God. Then it’s his turn to pray for me: “Dear Lord, thank you for healing mom’s back with her new chiropractor,” he says. “Make sure she doesn’t have a back like an old grandma. Amen.”
Later, I recount this to my husband and we both have a good laugh before we drift off to sleep. I fall asleep almost instantly, then awaken twenty minutes later. This happens sometimes, but lately it’s been more often. I fall asleep fast and hard, then I’m wide awake for an hour or more.
Sometimes, while I’m lying there, my heart flutters and I spend a few endless seconds trying to control my breathing. I only feel it skip when I’m lying in bed and don’t know if it’s something that happens during the day too. Do I feel it now because I’m still and it’s dark and I have nothing else to do but count my heartbeats while trying to doze off?
Sometimes, I lie there and wonder if I’m paying enough attention to my life. Why don’t I take more pictures of the kids or write down the funny things they say? Am I missing it all? I worry about what I’m doing with my life or, more likely, what I’m not doing. I worry that I’ll never make new friends or write a book or live in the country. I worry that all my best days are behind me.
Today I turned thirty-nine. I never thought I’d be someone who worried much about aging. I always assumed I’d do so with grace and acceptance, embracing the wrinkles and gray hairs along with hard-won wisdom and self-confidence. I didn’t know that the back-end of my thirties would be filled with insecurity and doubt, that I’d let other people tell me who I am or that I’d end up doing things I never really wanted. I didn’t know I’d worry that I was wasting my life.
I’ve made it this far but still know so little.
A few years ago, in therapy, my counselor and I did an exercise she called ‘the conference table.’ I was supposed to imagine a room with a long table in it and, one by one, versions of myself would walk in and take a seat.
This was part of trauma therapy, so the versions of myself were the traumatized ones, myself at the ages when traumas occurred. We’d already made a list of my memorable traumas in chronological order, so I had a sense of who would be invited to the table. I asked each version in, let them choose their seat, and observed them.
The exercise was predicated on the idea that these multiple selves still live inside me. That felt true. There were multiple selves inside me, some of them raging, some triggered by things happening in the present. Bringing them to the table was a way to honor each and see how they related to each other and, most importantly, to me, the adult version of myself who, if everything is well, sits at the head of the table.
I’ve been thinking a lot about those multiple selves. Not just the traumatized ones but all of them: the strong ones, the empowered ones, the intuitive and instinctive ones.
Lately, this is always on my mind.
It’s a secret of adulthood, I think, that these multiples selves exist. And also, that your self continues to morph and multiply well after you’ve settled into your adult life. Some versions are confident and assertive, others are weak and frail. We never arrive at a version that has it all figured out. We evolve and change and stretch and grow. We slide back or forward or sideways.
And this is all normal.
But it’s damn uncomfortable.
In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert writes:
“You don’t just get to leap from bright moment to bright moment. How you manage yourself between those bright moments, when things aren’t going so great, is a measure of how devoted you are to your vocation, and how equipped you are for the weird demands of creative living.”
She continues: “Holding yourself together through all the phases of creation is where the real work lies.”
By phases of creation, she means literally creating something. But what about the act of creating our selves, the selves that emerge from those bright or not-so-bright moments?
That’s where the real work lies.
Earlier this year, I picked up Kathleen Norris’s The Cloister Walk, a book I haven’t read in years. Norris is a poet and a Benedictine oblate who writes about spiritual matters with a poet’s sensibility, particularly The Cloister Walk, which I read in my late twenties during a particularly tumultuous time in my life. I loved that she was a poet; I was a poet too.
In Norris, I found a kindred spirit. She writes about her overlapping vocations as writer and oblate, the intersection of liturgy and the sacredness of even our most mundane experiences. It was a first for me, a close look at the question of sacred versus secular and also of the Benedictine tradition, which was a far cry from the loose, nondenominational church tradition I grew up with. Maybe the life of a poet could in fact be a ministry to the world.
In The Cloister Walk, she writes, “Liturgical time is essentially poetic time, oriented toward process rather than productivity, willing to wait attentively in stillness rather than always pushing to ‘get the job done.’”
And, also, when asked, “What is the main thing a poet does?” Her answer: “We wait.”
It’s the waiting that’s the hardest part. We know patience is a virtue. We know that it’s a fruit of the spirit and that fruit needs time to ripen. All good things take time and when time shrinks around us, we lose our ability to wait.
I’ve felt that acutely in recent years, as I’ve seen my fortieth birthday come nearer. Now, less than a year away, forty feels disorienting. This is the middle, I think. I’m missing everything.
These recent years have felt fruitless, aimless. Having little kids at home gave me a sense of purpose and direction, and I couldn’t wait to send them off to school so I could have my life back. Instead, I tried and failed and pushed too hard in too many wrong directions. In the end, I threw my hands in the air and gave up, tired and exasperated.
How do we account for our time when we have nothing to show for it, when we are fallow and unproductive? Even farmers know that the land needs seasons of rest. You can’t keep farming the same field year after year and expect it to produce. The soil needs time to replenish its nutrients and restore it health.
Sometimes we need to let the muse rest. I heard this on a podcast earlier this year, an antidote to the writing advice that says to write every day, that suggests we should always be in production mode.
Let the muse rest. Let the land replenish itself. Give yourself time. Wait.
Norris writes:
“Poets are immersed in process…as a discipline. The hard work of writing has taught me that in matters of the heart, such as writing, or faith, there is no right or wrong way to do it, but only the way of your life. Just paying attention will teach you what bears fruit and what doesn’t. But it will be necessary to revise—to doodle, scratch out, erase, even make a mess of things—in order to make it come out right.”
Whether we are poets or not, we are in process and part of that process is waiting. Part of it is messing things up and starting over. Part of it is taking a wrong turn and going back. We get things down on the pages of our lives and have to revise, to re-see where we’ve been to figure out where to go next.
Poets wait. They pay attention. They accept that process.
That’s what I want. More waiting. More acceptance. More patience to live my story, more willingness to revise.
Even in the middle of the night, having dozed and awakened, counting my heartbeats and remembering some previous version of myself, I think, This is the middle and also, There’s still so much farther to go. What I want is what everybody wants, which is this: to be myself, to feel like myself in the world.
And, as I lie there in the dark, I think of one of my favorite poems, one I gave to my husband when I first realized I loved him, Raymond Carver’s “Late Fragment”:
And did you get what
you wanted from this life, even so?
I did.
And what did you want?
To call myself beloved, to feel myself
beloved on the earth.
Leave a Reply