Unwinding
I decided I could not go back into the closet the next day. I could not stare at the dying tree. I sat down by the fireplace and opened a book; the lifelines I still clung to while avoiding Silence and Loneliness. My friend, Vonda, who I left at the Agency and at the Church, brought me a copy of Simply Tuesday, a treasured little read by Emily Freeman on not just accepting but moving towards our smallness. In the moment, I both like the idea and don’t like it at all. I’m confounded by my Smallness.
Across from me on this morning was the “other chair.” The one where all the crap gets thrown when we walk in the door. It holds a reflection of the life of the family each day: backpacks, purses, coats, books, shoes, laundry, lists, board games, dogs. On this particular morning it held the dry cleaning, four items which needed to find their way to someone who can sew (ooops, not me) and a pair of my husband’s shoes in need of resoling. These were my tasks for the day.
It was going to take some time to unwind. My new season offered small windows to step into when the kids weren’t pooping their pants and the dogs weren’t darting into the street and I was not out doing the mother trucking errands. I called my husband from the pickup in front of the dry cleaners, “Who was doing all of this? How were we functioning?”
At the same time the previous year, I was pulling together the production of fundraising events for our non-profit clients. Writing scripts. Bringing vision. Leading. Collaborating. Daring greatly, so I believed.
But on that small morning, I set my book down and I hugged my husband before he left to catch an airplane. Like really hugged him. I asked him about his week; what the days held between then and our weekend together. “Four planes,” he said. And did I have any Tylenol PM for him to leave at his residence in Baton Rouge. I felt him pick up that thing he sets down when he walks in the door on Friday evenings and put it back onto his shoulders for the week to come. I saw his heaviness, his gearing up for the challenge, and suddenly, I saw his need for me. There was an unspoken burden bearing down on him I had not seen before. I wondered what it was like for him to be shouldering this alone; while I was not making time for regular meals, the dry cleaning or goodbye affections.
Instead of re-living the guilt I had been processing through, I hugged him on his way out and held him for that extra moment, hoping our embrace could say the words I could not yet say, “Please forgive me.”
“I love you,” I whispered instead and cried when I closed the door because I was thankful I could see him for the first time in a long time and, even if just for a moment, ease his heaviness with my day’s small tasks.
I decided I needed a desk. A desk in the crying closet. A place to work. On Something. I drove to Ikea and picked out a white sit-stand desk with one million pieces and a novel of instructions and spread it all out on my closet floor. I was inviting Hope to come into the closet with me and Solitude and Silence and Loneliness and Fear. Maybe if I made a space for her, she'd show herself to me.
I found comfort and solace in this quiet process of piecing my desk together. Step 1, Step 2, Step 3, Step 4. Progress. Purpose.
I began pulling files and notebooks and random pieces of paper shoved into manilla folders out and onto the Desk where Something might happen. As I pulled down file after file, the writing was on the wall, so to speak. Paper after paper. Scribbles on post it notes. Sermon notes. Ideas. Torn out magazine clippings. The poem from the wedding. I wept again. Again, for me. And for all those words.
