Go Small and Show Up

 I came from a tradition of 'Go Big or Go Home.' But it was not ever really my style. A couple days ago, a friend shared something about 'showing up and going small' and it hit me in the solar plexus. 

I came from a strong tradition of 'go big or go home,' the hidden implication being 'because if you don't, why bother?'

The weekend came in hot and the kids were fractious and they stayed hot and fractious. The childminder had cancelled and I didn't want to call in the usual one; we've been leaning on her quite heavily. The bickering reached multiple fever pitches and -- I don't do this often -- but I wrote because all I wanted was for my mama and dad to be able to just intervene and whisk one away for a few hours.

In the end, I cancelled attendence from a thing and took the younger swimming. Because it just won't be like this always. AGMs, working groups will come and go, but this time, I only get this once. I know what I missed out, whilst my parents worked and worked (because they had to) and I work just as hard, but have the luxury of being more strategic about it. 

I think people call these things boundaries...but I'm not sure. 

All I know is that Colchester is not Walden Pond and that when I think of  Thoreau and his isolation, I am still filled with a rising as anger at the myth that he was roughing it, living off the land when his mum would bring his laundry. 

Sometimes, I feel this anger as I navigate the aisles of the grocery store, parenting a child I wasn't sure I would carry to term, was terrified I wouldn't be around for, terrified I might not be able to love. But I do love him, with a fierceness and finality that is quaking, but it is a love that took root in anger.  Anger at lies of omission and duplicity, at having to weather so much of the parenting storm on my own. Anger at intergenerational inheritance, at the sheer amount of undone left to do by people who couod've/should've done better.  

My therapist calls it the disportotionate balancing of hope versus experience. 'You keep hoping things will change. But your experience knows differently. So when are you going to give your experience it's valid weight? The scales are not even close to being valid. When are you going to actually sit with the sheer enormoity of sh*tty stuff that has happened to you over the course of your life and let yourself really know that it is not - in fact - at all fair? And that you didn't do anything to deserve much of it?'

Sometimes, I actively dislike my therapist.  Sometimes, I don't want to go, I don't want to sit, I don't want to do the work. I don't want to question, sieve, push, contemplate the darker aspects of myself that push me into reckless moments or poor decisions. I don want the silence or quiet screaming in my blood. Sometimes, I just don't want to show up at all. 

I've started paring back. Trying to figure out what makes me tick, makes me happy. I am not sure I've got the answers and I am certainly not sure I would know what to do with them if knew where they hung out. What corner would that be under? Close and Lost Cause? The Moon and St Christopher?