Today Is My Birthday, So Why Do I Ache?

December 9, 2011 By

This week – the last few weeks – have been deep.

They’ve included heartache, hurt and anger. They’ve included Joy, mindfulness and powerful connection.

And that’s just the personal stuff, between me and me.

Today is my 30th birthday.

I’ve looked forward to this day for so long. Excited, honored and ready to celebrate the last three decades of my life by bringing in the next with consciousness and embracing.

Yet, here I am. Within an ache I am trying to grasp.

With tears at the edge of my eyes.

With my heart breaking.

I’ve known that this birthday was going to be powerful. I felt it coming from years away. And I flowed with it and where it was taking me.

Transformation, I expected.

But I had no idea it would feel like this.

I’ve sat with this. Dwelled in it.

Allowed it to speak to me.

And it whispered,

“Release. Before you can embrace all that’s being offered you must release that which you’ve been holding onto.”

And then I read this from a friend…

I feel you’re so blessed with this .. to have it open ♥ hearts only break because they are no longer big enough to hold the new level of love that they are capable of giving and receiving and need to break open and stretch to their new capacity.

And so here I am.

Sitting with an ache I don’t fully understand, holding myself in a heart that is breaking, and moving into my 4th decade guided by the deeper parts of Life.

we must die to one life

As I was sitting with this post, deliberating hitting “publish”, I was reminded of this photo I posted in the spring.

Thank you, Life, for the reminder of what this is.

Filed Under: Celebrations Tagged With: , , ,

Unhappy News (and dreams and fears)

October 19, 2010 By

I’m feeling like the rubber ball attached to a paddle, one second flying high with wild excitement, the next being bashed against a wall. Success, failure, inspiration, frustration, pieces clicking into place, only to crumble apart again. A person can only ride a rollercoaster for so long before they need to vomit. Consider this my vomit.

Yesterday we were dealt a nasty blow to our dreams. The possibility of leaving Las Vegas by January has ended. The idea of two or three extra months here shouldn’t leave me in tears on the floor, but it did.

I don’t want to be here. I resist it with every fiber of my being. I make it clear to everyone I speak with that I’m only visiting. That this is not my home. I don’t feel good here, I don’t feel whole or fed or at peace here. I feel needy and desperate and lonely and empty. It took me 28 years to escape this the first time and seven months later I’m here again.

I don’t want to hear that there is a reason, that there is a message or a lesson in all this. I don’t want to hear that I need to let go, that I need to trust. I know it, but I resist it anyway.

Why? Because I’m afraid. I’m afraid of feeling trapped. I’m afraid of some giant cosmic hand telling me I’m “supposed to” be somewhere that makes me unhappy. I’m afraid of losing what I’ve found or finding that I didn’t deserve it in the first place.

In this past year I’ve wholeheartedly embraced a fear that has had me paralyzed for decades. I’ve lived in fear of Too Good Too Last, and I carefully kept my life and my joy at bay. I kept myself from loving or living unconditionally to protect myself from the pain that follows loss. Does that even make sense? I’ve felt that anything good will be taken from me, so I keep things two degrees off Good just to play it safe.

I thought through this amazing journey that I had conquered all of that. But as soon as Justin broke the news yesterday I felt that crushing fear, that desperate grasp for safety, those fortress walls springing back around me, my chest tightening and my joy slipping through my fingers. I heard that old familiar voice, “See? I told you it couldn’t last. Something was bound to come along and tear our dreams apart. This is it. It’s going to fall apart and you’re going to be trapped. You don’t deserve anything more.”

Ouch. I know it doesn’t even sound rational. It doesn’t feel rational either. It hurts. And it’s scary. It’s rubbing up against beliefs and thoughts I’m not ready to examine and it’s not accepting my attempt to put it off. It’s challenging me and it’s forcing me to stretch and grow. And all of that is good. I know it’s good. But that doesn’t mean I have to like it.

I want to face this. I want to push through it. I want to be handed a challenge and fly over it. I want to feel energized and more determined by it. I want to keep smiling, keep holding onto my joy. I want to embrace my fear with compassion.

I want to say I’m not in tears, hiding my face in my pillow and guarding myself against anything that feels good. I want to say I’m not pushing away the love I’m handed, letting go of the dreams I have for fear of more pain. I want to say I’m not questioning my spirituality, questioning whether Gd really is the bully with the magnifying glass burning holes in my heart.

But I can’t say any of that right now. It wouldn’t be real, authentic.

In this moment, right now, I hurt. In this moment, I feel a suffocating fear. This moment is messy and ugly and demanding tears. This moment is not allowing me to move.

So I’m doing the only thing this moment is asking me to do: I’m sitting in it. I’m allowing myself to cry or feel afraid or guarded. I’m allowing myself to resist. I’m embracing the messy and the vulnerable and the whiney. I’m playing the victim, and the Blame Game, and the big baby. I’m wallowing and hurting and questioning. I’m distracting myself. I’m wavering between sobs and angry outbursts.

No, it doesn’t really make sense. No, the details aren’t really that big of a deal. But this is what Life has handed my heart: not another three months, but a giant serving of Here’s Your Opportunity with a side of It’s Time To Face This Already.

It’s never about the details. It’s never about what happened or what’s going to happen. It’s about the messages we have hidden in our hearts, the stories we listen to, how they affect us, what we feel and what’s happening inside of us. It’s the bigger picture, when we can see it…and when we can’t.

I can’t see it. I can say it, but I’m too deep in it to really know it to be true. I can look at the words and reread them and still I hear that cynical, biting voice in my mind. So I’m holding onto the only two things I really do know to be true: I can be nothing but authentic. And life will ebb and flow, all things will pass.

This is me, authentic. Waiting for the fear to pass, for my ability to let it go.

Filed Under: Organic Wisdom Tagged With: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Odessa, Texas – My Father’s Hometown

September 24, 2010 By 17 Comments

I wasn’t really sure why I added #8: Visit my father’s hometown, until we were actually pulling closer to Odessa, Texas. It had always been he and my brother who spoke about visiting. But as we were driving down the 20 it suddenly became very clear.

From 1953

There were quite a few gaps in our relationship, some as wide as three years of silence. Others were smaller, missing pieces that you only come to miss when someone’s gone. It is the history, the connection to his past that I crave.

Based on what he spoke about I know exactly four things about his childhood:

  1. That any good dentist could tell where he was raised, because the water there was known for the stains on his teeth.
  2. That he moved away from his hometown and to Las Vegas when he was about 12 or 13.
  3. That he developed diabetes when he was 13 years old.
  4. That he and his friends used to cruise Fremont St before it became the “Experience”.

After he passed away, I found that he was born in Odessa, a bit of history he never really spoke about (he always just bragged about being Texan). I also found I had an uncle I never knew about (I searched all the Harold’s I could find and ended up meeting him and my beautiful cousin a day before the funeral; they never stayed in touch though). I also found a letter from his biological father just after he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes and a photo of him that I still own that looks eerily like my dad.

Directory

Odessa Directory

How strange is it to know so little of my dad before he was My Dad? My mom used to tell me stories about her and her siblings. I would visit her childhood home every summer until my grandparents finally moved. And I’ve watched home videos of her growing up. There is a history there, an ancestry I understand. I know my mother’s mother and grandmother and great-grandmother and their stories. But for my dad it’s almost as if he sprang into existence sometime in his 20′s.

So I went to Odessa, in hopes of drawing some map in my mind of who my father The Baby or The Toddler might have been. I guess in the back of my mind I was hoping to stumble across someone who had known my grandparents before they were grandparents, when they were still young and wide-eyed and bringing home a newborn baby boy. I was hoping to sit beside some old lady and hear stories of how my dad, The Baby, would cry or laugh or play with a toy truck while the adults ate together and drank ice tea in the heat.

The Archives

Sept 16 1953 Headline

Birth Announcement

Instead we found a directory that told me my grandfather was a truck driver, an address of where they lived when my dad would have been two, and a birth announcement with the address of his first home.

That home was gone, replaced with a concrete slab. The neighbors said it was a boarding house torn down in the 70′s, giving me more questions than answers.

The second home was there, though, and I tried to imagine my dad, The Toddler, playing in the yard. I tried to hear some child laughing or see some ghost of history there, but I couldn’t. I couldn’t picture what he looked like before the age of 29 or a grandmother who wasn’t in her 70′s.

1121 Texas Ave

Foster

Did I mention my grandmother died in June? No one called me to tell me. My other grandma found the obituary and my mom broke the news to me. And all I could do was sigh with the sadness of it all as that ancestral gap widen in my heart.

I didn’t know until now that I didn’t know the man I called Dad. I loved him and he loved me. But there was always something missing. Connection. History. Maybe he couldn’t give what he didn’t have.

But I can. I can love my dad for who he was, even if I’m not sure who that is. I can love the family I didn’t understand. And I can take what he didn’t give me as a gift, one of understanding just how important it is for your child to walk through the streets of your hometown and know where you once stood.

They all did the best they could with what they had. I have the chance to do better.

Filed Under: Life on the Road, Organic Parenting, People I Love Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

An Inner Memorial

January 27, 2010 By 28 Comments

our prayers, originally uploaded by fubuki.

Life…and death…have sent me a reminder.

I sat at my kitchen counter as I waited for my macaroni casserole to finish in the oven, determined to finish The Omnivore’s Dilemma which was due back today. Justin came in, wrapping his arms around me in silence. I finished my paragraph, and asked if something was wrong as I looked up.

Something was wrong. My husband had tears streaming down his face. He told me he just got off the phone. A friend of his had shot and killed himself yesterday, leaving behind a wife he had recently separated from and his two small children.

I held my husband while he tried to wrap his mind around the pain this man must have been so deeply absorbed in. And as I tried to send my love to both my grieving husband and this man’s family, I silently admonished myself: My husband had come to me in quiet tears and I had to finish my paragraph before even looking up.

You think you know a lesson. It’s been impressed upon you countless times. And yet, in the every day minutes of life it is so easily lost.

It takes only a moment for our worlds to change. It takes a mere second for a trigger to be pulled and every wrong-spoken word up to that point to seem inconsequential, meaningless or unnecessary. It takes one fateful phone call to remind us that the true meaning of life lies within the actions of a single breath.

I don’t pretend to know what the experience was imparting on the father and husband in my arms, not to mention the grieve of the closest loved ones left behind. But the only thing Justin could utter was the humor and fun this man had brought to his life. He had made work worth going to on the days when no one wanted to get out of bed. His laughter left a legacy.

Earlier this morning, I had read a comment addressed to me about Zeb’s education or potential lack there of. And the words came swimming back to me as a reminder as I pressed my forehead to my husband’s and wiped away his tears. How can we wrap ourselves up in the things that will not matter in the end? Surely we can find a way to grow and learn and experience in this life without forgetting why it is we want to live in the first place? We chase those dreams for the hope of finding what we already have within our immediate reach – joy and happiness and peace.

We, our family, lives for love. We want to live in a way to never again hear about a person’s death and become overcome with regret over the last words uttered or the memories never made. (Please Gd, let it not be forgotten again.)

Let me repeat myself, if for no one else but myself: At the end of our lives, when the phone calls are being made from one person to the next, nothing else will matter but the memories that come swarming back into the hearts of the people we called friends, were lucky enough to call family.

Life…and death…have sent me a reminder. Gentler this time, but just as powerful. And I’m feeling impressed upon to pass it along to you.

In memory of Justin’s friend, Dave and his wife and most especially his babies: Put away your deadline or your goal. Set aside your pride or your impatience. Put down your book…and walk up to someone in your life right now with nothing more than unconditional love. Hold them. Tell them what they mean to you.

Give them something pure to remember you by.

Nothing else matters.

Filed Under: People I Love, Things To Remember Tagged With: , , , , ,

Slow Dancing

March 12, 2009 By 23 Comments

Darkness

This week marks the second pregnancy I’ve lost in six months. Both times I felt early on that something was amiss and braced myself for the worst. But no amount of bracing can prepare your heart for such a devastation as this.

I’ve dealt with the awareness of secondary infertility for six years now. It’s been a tender bruise on my heart that I’ve masked from most of the world. Wrapped up in disappointment after disappointment are the feelings of guilt and failure. Of being less of a woman; incapable of giving a brother or sister to a little boy who’s learned how sore the subject is; unable to give a birth child to the man who told me of his only heart’s desire on our second date. I’ve railed against (what I know as and call) Gd and fate, my own body and my own choices for what feels like an eternity. I’ve held resentment and anger towards mothers I viewed as ungrateful for the gift they had and wasted or took for granted. I’ve held onto dreams and names and hope only to see them turn into someone else’s child. I’ve screamed in my husband’s arms over the injustice of our losses and cried myself to sleep too many times to count.

And all this time I’ve separated these bitter pains from the rest of my life. Hiding away our attempts, our desperate prayers, our broken hearts. I’ve tried to create spaces in my life that reflect happier things; things that don’t reverberate my bones in agony or despair. Things that allow me to appear – to myself and the world – as if there is something within my control.

But this most recent wound has torn open old scars as well and I’m finding myself unable to hold back the gush of bleeding that has followed. I’ve been riding a rollercoaster of emotion – heartache to resolve, anger to acceptance and back again. In that one moment of truth it all changed. And now I’m standing here with the cold, hard facts of my entire life before me. This event has shaken me awake and made me stare into my own eyes; made me question everything I think I know. Made me ask what is really going on and what really matters.

I’ve looked back over my last several posts, over all the supposed soul-searching and saw what I haven’t wanted to see. I wasn’t trying to do anything but control, manipulate, and force what it is I think is right and wrong in myself and my life. I rearranged and rehashed and reworked ways to be the ruler of my universe. I’ve been fighting and pushing and pulling against what IS for what I think should be. And all it gives me is a short sense of accomplishment, quickly followed by the same feeling of sadness.

I am sad. It is so hard for me to admit that openly. I am sad for what I cannot seem to have, for what I perceive myself as having become, for what I feel is lacking. Joy and laughter, creativity and peace. Another soul within our home. And I carry this ache within my heart and constantly judge my actions against my dreams. I’ve become unhappy not only with what I have or lack, but with who I am.

What if the question is not why I am so infrequently the person I really want to be, but why do I so infrequently want to be the person I really am?

I stumbled across a book at the library – my only place of quiet solitude – with that question sprawled across the front. The book is called The Dance: Moving to the Rhythms of Your True Self and it’s title had jumped out at me, perhaps because I had seen this blog about dance earlier in the day and its means of expression through movement had resonated with me. I sat down in an armchair by a warm, sunny window and began to read. And it was as if every single word on every single page was being directed solely at me. And because my heart is no longer allowing me to hold it back, I cried right there. This is an unfamiliar place to be. Frustration and anger have been emotions I’ve become comfortable sharing. But aching sadness is a foreign territory and all I want to do is crawl away and hide myself from curious onlookers.

Chapter by chapter I was reminded that through all my attempts to control or “create”, I’ve lost touch with what I once knew. That this world is just a dream and I’m a dreamer curled within the hands of Gd; that some things cannot be explained and somethings happen beyond our control. And that in all my attempts to micro-manage every corner of this existence, I have betrayed my ability to simply trust Gd and experience the divinity of letting go. And now my soul has been exposed and what is flooding out cannot be held back. I’m no longer trying to ignore what Gd is whispering in my ear and my broken heart is in need of a healing I can’t manage on my own.

So forgive me if this blog veers temporarily as I use this space that has meant so much to me as a sounding board for my internal and emotional acid trip. This may all become too raw or too personal or too wacky for you to follow and please know that I understand whether you choose to duck out the backdoor or pull up a chair. My only hope is that I can emerge from the other side with some sense of understanding or well-being I don’t currently own. Gd help me along the way.

~Tara


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Filed Under: Organic Wisdom Tagged With: , , , , ,