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Archives for January 2020

When the Past Processes You

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Last week I wrote about processing the Old things, the past things that I have stored in boxes for years—difficult for me to do, but necessary and freeing in its own way. But it was nothing compared to what happened when the Old things of the past processed me. Moving has always been a double-edged sword for me—on the one hand, I anticipate the excitement of a new place to discover and explore. A starting over, in a way. On the other hand, I could hardly bear to leave the old place. Each house, each place was a sanctuary for me—it was a place of safety (although that was challenged a number of times for various reasons), a place of comfort, a place I loved. So even when I was all-in on the move, it was hard. The boxing-up process was the most difficult—until the final, final, final time of walking out the door. There have been people in my life who have pushed me at those times—Chris of course, my Mom, a couple good friends, my daughter Emily this time—who box up the remaining things despite my protests and urge me out the door. Even as I desperately cling to the door jambs.

On the surface, I try to reason with myself, going between the pros and cons. With each pro-moving point, I rebut with “But how can I leave these…sunsets…

…these sunrises out my beautiful screened-in porch…

…my animal friends?

All of those surface rebuts are valid and tender and real, and they also reveal a glimpse into the essence of why this is so very hard for me. This time, this move, this boxing time was different. It was ugly and raw and wildly animalistic. I couldn’t bear to pack up my things, especially the special things, and I wouldn’t let anyone else touch them. Emily came to help me, and I resisted every move she made. I came un-done if she or Chris packed up anything without my permission. I instantly flew into a whirlwind of rage and panic: I yelled, I cried old, difficult tears, I stomped my feet, I wailed like a wounded animal. It was scaring the heck out of all of us. There had been weeks, maybe months—it was all such a blur—of tears that flowed from some artesian well of the Universe, for no one person could possibly produce so many tears, could they? And it all came to a head when my dear daughter was here to help. Every day had multiple episodes of this unreasonable behavior, and once I had control of the situation again, I was able to calm down and resume our work. And then the tantrum would happen again. Finally, after I don’t know how many exhausting days of this, we took a lunch break, and as I sat very still at the table, the tears quietly streamed down my face, still. Emily—God bless her patience and maturity—asked me what was going on. In that moment, I finally knew. I managed to finally speak the words, “I feel exactly like I did when I was in first grade, when we moved away from South Dakota.” The Past had been processing me. I talked about how difficult our life had been in the year and a half before the move, how I didn’t want to leave the farm, how I couldn’t bear to leave my animal friends—the cows, chickens, kittens, dogs, and the big, black horse, how I didn’t want to leave my grandparents, how I loved the sandbox and the weeping willow tree. I talked about how out-of-my-control it all felt, and how the boxes swallowed up all of the familiar, safe, loved things and took them into a truck to a new, unfamiliar place. And with that realization and that space and time from my loving daughter and husband, and with those words, the panic began to abate. There were a few more episodes in the next couple of days, but the fury of them had passed—and then they were gone. I was an adult once again. The process of moving moved on.

Recalibrating From the Old to the New

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Out with the old, in with the new. It’s literally true when it comes to time—2019 ended and was out of here at the stroke of midnight on New Year’s Eve. The new year had arrived. Some people live their lives with that mantra in a myriad of ways—old clothes out, new clothes in; old furniture out, new furniture in; old relationships out, new relationships in. But what happens when the old things don’t go out before the new things come in—or more importantly, what happens when a person moves on to the new thing without processing the old? An easy example is the mail—the new mail comes in to that place on the cupboard or table. Organized people process the mail—junk goes in the trash can or recycling, bills go on the desk, magazines go on the coffee table where they will be seen and read, etc. Not-so-organized people soon get a pile where things get buried at the bottom, bills can get lost until past the due date, and magazines don’t get read.

I know about piles. (I’m organized about certain things and not-so about others.) I know about getting rid of the old (and keeping it), and I’m not that enticed with the newest, shiniest ‘new’ thing. Time (and maybe mail) is the only consistent flow of old and new in my life. But when the old year ended, we did something big—we moved from our old home. When the new year began, the new decade began, we were living in a new place. We didn’t time it that way, but it happened that way. The pull of ideas started long ago—those questions: what would it be like if…, I wonder if that would work…, how would it feel if we did this…? Questions can be ignored, especially if they make a person uncomfortable. But Life can get more insistent. So I started to de-clutter—we needed to do it anyway, I reasoned. I read Marie Kondo’s book—does it bring me joy? Don’t forget to thank the things that had served me well. Ugh. I wasn’t very good at it. I was nostalgic about so many things—about all the art projects the kids and I had done together when they and their curious, creative, beautiful minds had brought me so much joy during my stay-at-home years, about the papers and projects and awards they earned during their school years as they grew into these amazing people, and about all the work I had done in grad school—boxes and boxes of research articles I had read, papers I had written, and data I had gathered. The Old was staring me in the face after being tucked away in boxes since our last move. Paralyzing.

There is a ton of research out there about why our brains and bodies react as they do. Being ‘paralyzed’ comes from the ‘freeze’ aspect of ‘fight, flight, or freeze’ in the trauma response—we all (including most animals) tend to react primarily by one of those aspects when something seems overwhelming to us. But what to do with that…. I was fortunate to have some important people around me who could help me look at the big, paralyzing Old stuff in a different way. But it wasn’t easy. I balked. I cried. I resisted. I rationalized. With time and grace, understanding and encouragement from those around me, I was able to look at the Old stuff, determine what it represented to me, accept that those qualities and memories existed even without the stuff, and let it go. As the move materialized, I ran out of time to process it all, and I was determined to do more of that work once we moved.

There was another aspect of the move that needed processing—leaving all the beautiful trees and perennials that we had planted. I had the urge to take pictures of each specific one, bragging about how big it had grown, how beautiful its branches were…and I even started to do so…

Each one had a story and a timeline and a beautiful quality and an imperfection—and we loved them—and there were hundreds of them that we had planted after all the work of removing the horrible Buckthorn. With Chris’ expertise and love of growing trees and perennials, with his hard and dedicated work with the Buckthorn puller, and with my patience and tenacity for pulling weeds, we had created an oasis among the Oaks. Did I mention how much we loved them? Yet under the arc of time, that flow of old to new, year after year, we were reminded that we had done this before. We had cleared and planted and weeded and pruned and created four beautiful places in three different states in our life together. It’s what we do, it’s a big part of who we are. I also realized that I have told the stories and shared the photos of our amazing plant family over the last six years with this blog. You have shared in our love of this great, green Earth.

A friend of mine has a book that I read cover to cover when I was in the midst of confronting the Old —Ten Poems to Say Goodbye by Roger Housden. Housden wrote about poet Jack Gilbert and his love for Santorini, Greece—“Santorini as Gilbert knew it entered not only his eyes but his sinews, his very cells, like anything we have loved. It is alive in him still, not just in memory, but in his being…” Chris and I carry our Old places—the trees and plants, the houses, the people we have loved—in our cells and sinews, in our very being.