Probably one of the most painful lessons I've learned in my own life, and in observing the lives of those closest to me, is that of dealing with serious personal issues LATER. Which means, in general, that those serious personal issues are NOT being dealt with right NOW. I ran away from the remains of my childhood while in Israel -- a long story -- and thought I took control of my life. I thought that right up until problems with my marriage and my mothering of my firstborn in her elementary school years pulled me up by the short hairs.
That's because in my late teens and through most of my twenties, I reveled in my supposed freedom from the emotional baggage of my youth. Things I heard and witnessed and endured. The pain of feelings suppressed; the fear of no safety net; the disconnect from society; a deep spiritual abyss of confusion. What I couldn't see clearly was that all of that baggage accompanied me through my perceived escape from an oppressive existence . . . and it rolled right alongside me as I took my marital vows, labored through childbirth, struggled to understand the nuances of 'real life', careened through parenting and exhausted both my husband and myself in those early years.
Though my gifts for compassion and discernment ran deep, they were tainted by a skewed perspective and a surprising naivete concerning the nature of people around me. My sense of right and wrong was very acute and intensely black and white in situations where I really should have loosened up a bit. And as I pushed headlong through my budding adulthood, a greenhorn in so many areas of the mundane day-to-day duties, my anger grew. It erupted in the face of intense emotional situations which became so because I didn't have the internal tools to effectively and quietly deal with bumps and spills in relationships without taking it far too personally. My sense of righteousness and my way with words made me a force with which to be reckoned. Not to everyone. Only to some. And most often to myself.
I was afraid at the root of it all. Afraid of loss. Afraid of failure. Afraid of being wrong. Afraid to have the rug pulled out from beneath me yet again. I craved regularity for so long, stability and security, and yet when they arrived their features were so unfamiliar that I turned from them. I turned to the familiar unhealthy thought patterns. I turned and embraced the very pain from which I had been running. And in doing do, though I remained worthy of love and affection, though I could present as intelligent and amusing, I became ineffective in very vital ways.
For years, I ran into walls with my children, sure I was inadequate, afraid to introduce them to the God in which I was sure I still believed, and positive they would eventually be as screwed up as I felt. Instead of finding the good in my husband, in our relationship, I allowed for the eventuality of divorce, the inevitability of a split, the finality of an end to us in the not-so-distant future. My problems with my body image, with bulimia, with Gloria, created terrible moments of private paralysis -- a pair of snug jeans or a serving of corn chips could be, and often was, my emotional undoing. Not the best of foundations for success in my chosen lines of work, so to speak.
Though I do believe that with the passing of each year a piece of me returned to the whole and was knitted back into place, that process didn't happen quickly enough to spare those around me from the damage I inflicted in my broken state. Not that it was intentional. In some cases, I didn't know any better. My boundaries were stretched. My mindset far from center. If ever I could change one thing about my life after my childhood (because that would be the obvious Genie-in-a-bottle wish) it would be the rate at which I realized that eschewing my hurts only caused further hurts. By not dealing with my wounds early on, I created a far more difficult scenario from which to extricate myself AND my loved ones later in life. I could have been a better parent and wife and sister and daughter. A better friend. More effective. My life could have been lived with far more purpose and much less getting by. That whole survive or thrive thing. It's not that I live in that regret. No, not at all. I love my life here and now. Enough healing has occurred for me to feel reset and restored . . . and purposeful. But I live with the awareness of that fact. An awareness which makes me more sensitive to others caught in similar webs.
That my powers of persuasion and assistance are limited is now excruciatingly obvious to me. Excruciating because outside of prayer and love, there is often nothing I can do to change the life circumstances of people for whom I care very deeply. When my sister suffered her post-partum psychotic episode and took her children's lives, I couldn't spare her the resulting agony nor could I walk the dark path back to life on which she had to journey. Nor could I absorb the pain of the other families or my own. Such an all-encompassing helplessness, beyond anything I had felt previously . . . and that's saying something. When I turned my baby brother into the police, and he was sentenced to over a decade in prison, a flame in some deep chamber of my heart was tamped into darkness for what seemed several decades. Though I imagined what his life must have been, it was his life to endure and not mine. When my other brother, husband and father to three, discovered a cancerous mass had invaded his fit body, the shock rippled like a sonic boom through me. I couldn't love it or joke it away. The hours of chemo and resulting illness and weakness broached no sisterly stand-in: it was all his to take in and in and in. Poisoning himself to combat a deadlier poison. I could not comprehend how my siblings deserved any of it after what they lived through in our shared early years.
But it's not a world where fairness is dished out with any sort of regularity and justice, is it? Otherwise, in some burst of wise epiphany, those of us on the outside looking in on people with problems like the ones I just outlined would swoop in and offer assistance in just the right way: disaster would be averted. Broken hearts, destroyed lives, unfairness in truckloads . . . would cease to exist. Someone would have caught my brother's need for counseling to combat mental illness before drugs became a complication and led to a life of petty crime and terrible decision-making. Someone would have recognized the signs of post-partum depression and dragged my sister to a doctor, whether she wanted it or not, and Grace and Gabriel would be playing with my son in Colorado right now. Someone would have caught my brother's back pain early on and diagnosed him before the lymphoma jumped up in stages; better yet, he would never have developed a liking for Diet Pepsi and thus exposed himself daily to the artificial sweetener directly linked to his cancer.
My experiences have increased my sensitivity to possible unfolding tragedy. I don't seek such things out. But my radar is a bit more attuned. So, I don't hold back if I see a situation where a word or action might defuse a moment or create a buffer or educate, educate, educate. But even then, some will be helped and some won't. There are those individuals who are able to see their shortcomings and weaknesses and wish to be restored. But it seems that there are far more who are shortsighted and too weak to accept a leg up onto the dry shore from the shipwreck banging about in the dirty waters around them. They're the ones who still have the power to scare me to my very human core. They're the ones who keep me tethered to prayers of gratitude and beseeching.
Often, they're the ones you love for who they are, even the ugly. They are the closest to your bared and beating heart. And thus they have the power to cause great damage in their wounded state. Exploding shrapnel. Far-reaching. Long-range. Enduring. Scarring.
At times like that, all you or I can do is don our battle gear, secure our helmets and assume a protective position. And I also cry.
