Maple took this candid picture of Chris this week at his Thursday blood draw. I love the open honesty of him here. So real. So revealed.
I am not sure how to pick up the pieces here. I have been avoiding this space, for specific and obvious, as well as non-specific more disordered, reasons for months. Well before Chris was diagnosed with Leukemia. It is tricky with a personal blog. Which is what this is, after all. A personal blog, with relatively few regular readers and a handful of random or intermittent ones. And while nothing that I share in this space is intended to reach anyone in specific, it is intended to be read. There is something about this circuitry that is essential to the function of this space as a creative outlet for me.
Cuz that is really what it is; a creative outlet. While avoiding this space I have been scratching the itch here and there with longer Instagram posts of prose and poems, my occasional newsletter, and then also the updates on Chris’ Caring Bridge and whatever way that helps me to feel some relief through the mechanical “words out” process of writing there. None of it has really been cutting it in terms of what I am looking to access within myself through writing, but it has been better than nothing.
I am a huge believer in the telling of personal experience and reflection as a means for authentic and vulnerable connection. How the specifics of personal stories tap into universal truths to which we can all see aspects of ourselves, or touch some truth inside of us for which we couldn’t find the words or the insight on our own. I am a big fan. It is foundational to how I move in the world, as a person, as a parent, as a partner, as a learner, and as a teacher. However, the intersection of personal and private is not always so easy to navigate and I have found myself stuck in space for many months now. Many of the things that are alive for me in my life now are coiled around the dynamics and the dysfunction of relationships for which airing too much, or the wrong thing, could be potentially injurious to a few here and there readers.
This is dicey and I don’t know how to deal with it so I have just stayed away. However, the problem with that is that writing in this personal yet public way is how I digest much of my experience and without it, I find the bits and pieces of various hurts fermenting in my belly in a way that keeps the pain leaking out into the rest of me at a steady drip. Better out than in is a motto that applies well to my relationship with feelings and writing, and yet, I am also interested in protecting myself.
I have spoken with many writers about the less-than-savory reality regarding the need to let certain players die before the writing that really needs to happen can happen. It is gross to even write down, but true nonetheless. How do we navigate that as creatives? How do we do no harm when our silence becomes injurious to ourselves? And yes, talking with a therapist is very helpful and I do and even still… this is my medium. The words, permanent and indelible, are my craft. So what then? I have always said that I am most interested in what abides, outlasting the flashy and transient in favor of the long game. Well, here we are meg. Here we are.
One of the unexpected parts of Chris getting sick that has come up for both of us is the way that family members have or have not shown up. There are some relationships that feel bolstered for which a healing has been ignited for us as well as for our kids. It is beautiful. The people for whom loving them is complex and frustrating but hot damn do they show up when we need them and in so doing teach us to hold the difficulty with more grace and understanding. And then there are those whom we haven’t heard from in years and years and years suddenly making an appearance, who have expressed zero interest in the incredible children we are raising or the lives we have been living. Their arrival now, when they are afraid that they may lose Chris without any resolution to whatever conflict they believe themselves to be suffering, reads only as selfish. That is for them, noot for us. Certainly not for Chris.
And then there are the ones who do not say a word. Close family whose silence only reveals the lack of care that we have felt, but tried to deny, our whole lives. Their indifference makes us question our own felt and lived experience of reality. Doubt our own internal compass, the one that we have meticulously built around our personal values, what holds meaning and worth and truth in these lives that we have been crafting together through two decades.
I grew up with a parent who discredited my reality, denied my feelings, told me time and time again that I was wrong, and that I was a liar. I grew up with zero safety inside of myself because I had no sense of what was real if I was not. I was the kid and young adult who could not express an opinion or a preference because I could not find any answers inside of myself. I lacked the confidence to believe that I could know myself. I was taught to reference everything externally. My adult life has been about deconstructing the myths of my childhood as well as creating healthy boundaries and the trust necessary to reparent those wounded parts of myself. And I have done a marvelous job. I really have. But this moment in my life, in our lives, as we consider our connections and our resiliency amid tragedy and trauma, has reopened some wounds and I am sitting in that discomfort now. With adult eyes and perspective but also with the hurt pieces of my younger meg’s heart.
It is so difficult, as a parent, to conceive of being ok with wounds of this kind living in my own children. Especially wounds of my own making. And to be clear I am by no means naive to the damage that I am undoubtedly responsible for in our kids. With more to come I am certain. However, I have never parented them with the notion that I am the immovable object around which they must bend. I am a work in progress here too. Growing and learning and changing as I go.
I think this may be where I leave it today. I am here and also, in a way, not here. But I am not, as I had considered for weeks, retiring this blog. Not yet anyway. I am working on myself. Always. With my humanity. With my grief. I am orienting around love and truth and trust and the messy imperfection of my life and its contents. I am continuing to place value on honest relationships over image or reputation, and I hope that in so doing, what shines through is the heart of a real woman.