On the Threshold - Three

Our daughter has been in wilderness therapy for more than three weeks and as the immediate relief wears off, there’s an increasingly loud absence.

When I walk my dogs I’ve learned that what I notice tends to reflect where I am (or am not and wish I was) or where I need to go.  Around this time I began noticing burrow entrances.  Some were no more than tiny holes beside the path, others, like the one pictured above, were elaborately crafted and inviting, worthy of the Hundred Acre Wood or Mole’s delightful home in The Wind in the Willows.

If my psychic space is a house, envision me after those first few weeks standing on the threshold realizing that I’m afraid to go in.  I’m not as ready to be alone as I thought I was.  The space inside my mind is full, but almost every thought relates in some way (sometimes tortuously) to my daughter.  My own affairs have been relegated to a “we’ll see” limbo and, in some cases, squeezed out altogether.  Every day I’ve been ready to bargain, to put off whatever I had planned to do in order to be there to help her.   I would get to whatever it was, sooner or later.  

Third week in, certainties are slipping away.  I’m totally shaken up about the choices I’ve made over the last couple of years.  All the literature urges parents not to blame ourselves, but also say that our daughter has to help herself.  The literature also promises that now is the time to start the healing process, so why do I feel so terrible? My inner dialogue is more atrocious than ever as I have more time and energy to devote to ruminating.  Around and around the thoughts go:  All this must be your fault!  You know it isn’t!  But how can it not be?  You should have found help sooner!  You tried!  Not hard enough!  What if you had said no/yes when . . . ?  Underneath runs the mantra: Unfair! Unfair! Unfair!  I’d like to stop, but I haven’t any idea where to begin.  

At the same time I’m feeling truculent, suspicious, even trammeled.  I’m beginning to realize that not only have I relinquished responsibility, I’ve relinquished control.  After all, the process is begun, whether I like it or not for hasn’t my daughter taken charge of her life?  Isn’t that what I wanted?  Well, yes.  

That leaves it up to me to take my own first steps, but here’s the problem: I don’t want to, I’m not ready.  

Now that I am alone, I can’t avoid seeing that even while I’ve protested about fitting my own needs around hers, a part of me has embraced this—after all—being occupied with my daughter’s problems has freed me from taking my own too seriously.  Until now, I have bargained with myself during each crisis that I’m only temporarily putting my affairs on hold while I tend to this much more important matter of helping my child; each time I’ve convinced myself that this will be the last time.  Even if I never meant for any of this to happen, the ‘normal’ (whatever that is) course of detaching from parents and moving out into the world was interrupted.  I’ve gotten used to things being the way they are and changing even small habits is difficult, and this is so much bigger.  

So, yeah, I’m exhausted and not at all eager to get my own life back on track.  I mean, I am eager, but I am also weary.  I’m angry too, mostly with myself, and I’m also very sad and cry almost every day.  I can’t relax my vigilance, that is, not yet, although I can expect over time I might.  After all, I’ve been through difficult times before so I know what I need to do is to rest and be patient and remind myself what my daughter has elected to do this winter is exponentially more difficult than anything I have to do.  

Yet little wonder that I look longingly at these burrow openings.  Somewhere, deep inside a little animal is curled up sleeping away the winter months, safe and snug.  I wish it was me.