The potential for love in my life is immense. I have been blessed to share this journey with a loving and supportive partner, his two exceptional children (now young adults) and three children who we have welcomed into our family together. Moreover, I have family, friends and community who love me deeply. And yet, this particular period in my life is the loneliest.
Each day, I am kissed, hugged, snuggled, tickled, and affirmed (“You are the best Mom”) by my kids and I have to admit that there are no better moments in my days. Life is full. Life is busy. We are living without margins. As a time-driven and goal-oriented person, I don’t always think I have time to stop, simply to love and be loved. In his book, “A Path with Heart”, Jack Kornfield poignantly reveals that following a path with a heart “transforms and touches us in the center of our being” (Kornfield, p. 12). He also says, “in modern life we have become so busy with our daily affairs and thoughts that we have forgotten [the] essential art of taking time to converse with our heart”. When I choose to practice this dialogue with my heart, which some traditions may refer to as prayer, my living is more in line with my values; my peace of mind is maintained. However, I routinely align myself with my idealist and perfectionist notions of relationship and life instead of trusting the sage wisdom of tradition.
My vision of motherhood was…. somewhat different than what I have been experiencing over the last number of years. Given my desire to become a mom and the unexpected (but consciously thought-out) journey we took towards creating a family, it is completely baffling to me that parts of motherhood challenge me to stretch and grow seemingly beyond my capabilities, beyond my comfort and beyond the place where confidence lies. The ideal and the real, for me, share virtually no commonalities. The ideal simply begins as an idea. Ideas form the basis for the romance we carry on with ourselves; romantic notions allow us to step forward and experience something new and unexpected. We can get stuck in the ideal when we don’t allow experience to shape and re-shape our ideas into something that is real. In my life, the ideal has collided with the real resulting in a chaos that has required extreme effort and will to pull out of. Much of my adolescent life was spent creating images of marriage and motherhood. I did not doubt either my destiny or my abilities; both have been challenged in my adult living.
Being around children has always come easy to me; I naturally relate to and enjoy them. My kids, however, have challenged me beyond imagination and revealed a somewhat demonic ugliness (in me) that has been gut-wrenching and soul breaking for me to experience. Therefore, reaching my parenting potential has taken intentional effort and conscious ‘training’. Through parenting seminars and personal counseling, I have honed my natural abilities, learned and practiced new parenting tools and learned about child development; all this has helped me to cope with the unforeseen demands of parenting, especially those of children with special needs.
My parenting journey has also come with an inordinate amount of grieving. There was, in the beginning, the difficult task of getting pregnant. Then the change of self, somehow losing and gaining parts in the depth of responsibility, the clamoring need and the wholeness required of a skilled and loving parent. Then, far beyond my imaginings, the loving relationship I have shared with Ward has been challenged, and feels, at times, fragmented. But it is even deeper and broader than that.
When Yohannes’ had been in our family for a few weeks, we sat snuggled in the rocking chair, naming things in English (nose, eyes, mouth); it was an early moment of beauty, similar to moments I had shared with my newborn nestled into the crook of my arm, feeding. However, when I looked into the pool of his deep brown eyes and wondered who this little boy was, and how exactly God had chosen us to parent him, I became aware of another presence: his birth mother; a woman who had to give him up under the worst circumstances. And I felt her trust in me. I fully felt her loss in that moment, and have not been able to forget that sensation. Now I am mother to another of her children. Faven reveals to me the person her birth mother was; she remembers the pain of such a loss; Faven questions God’s motives for the path her life has taken; she misses her birth mother so deeply that she would be willing to die, so that she could see her again in heaven. My grief is renewed for my children, and for the family that has left them and the family that we have left behind.
Over these years, with so much emotional intensity, stimulation and grief in my life, it has been difficult to be around other people. What many people see is a happy, connected and beautiful family with parents who are not only capable, but are also successful, proactive and caring. That is only part of the truth. Our daily reality, right now, is that we are stressed, challenged and working as hard as we possibly can to hold our marriage and our family together. We have so little left for anyone else and are reluctant to share our struggles – we simply have no energy or words. We have isolated ourselves as a basic coping mechanism and also to protect ourselves from the narrative of society.
Being an introvert further removes me from the community I once thrived in. I need time to re-energize away from people. Those of you who have been in my presence as I am parenting my three (or four) children will understand how much stimulation I am privy to in a day – or even an hour! Spending the majority of one’s time with people (ie. children) who are naturally and developmentally egocentric takes its toll. Young children are naturally self-centered; it ensures that they get their needs met. Brilliant design! They truly have the gift of ‘living in the(their) moment’ and feeling that moment only. Furthermore, if you add in the characteristics of AD/HD, you have a longer period of time to endure this self-centeredness! All this knowledge does help my logical brain (and I am a logical person), however, it still challenges my emotional brain, and my energy level immensely. When my ‘shift’ is done, or when I have a much needed ‘break’, I don’t welcome further stimulation, of any kind. It becomes extremely difficult to maintain adult relationships with the fuel gauge sitting on empty.
One key for me is to practice gratefulness for the love I have in my life, but also to notice and be okay in the loneliness. My life has benefited from living with intention and accepting the intensity, while consciously choosing the presence of insightful, skilled, loving and supportive counselors. My life is filled with opportunities (disguised as challenges)! I know that love and loneliness can and do co-exist. Loneliness is simply a feeling that crashes down on us like a wave, but eventually drifts back out to sea. Our thoughts are powerful creators of feelings.
In my loneliest and most trying periods, I am but a seedling in the hands of God, capable of growth beyond my own dreams.
