Coffee Chat: Another Season

Hello dears.  Come in and join me for a lovely cup of something hot.  I've got good old Maxwell House coffee and a very good English breakfast tea both of which fill one with the necessary warmth to brave this cold weather we are having.  I highly recommend the tea with a Walker's Shortbread cookie.  You'll find it both makes you feel refined and cozy, a rather luxurious state to be in.  I think of myself sitting near the fire and communing with some of the characters in my many English novels.  

Have a seat dear, do have a seat and let's talk.  It's been a while, hasn't it?  I've nothing in particular in mind just yet to say but these conversations tend to evolve into their own thing anyway, so we shall see where we go.

It's cold.  We went down to 17F last night and that is cold.  We slept with the propane heater on, and a kettle of water simmering on the stove.  We opened the doors on sink cabinets so the warmth of the house could penetrate, and we left faucets dripping.  We turned on the pump house light.  We piled covers on the bed and wore socks to sleep in.  I told John that if we lived now as I grew up, I'd buy both of us nightcaps to wear to bed to help conserve body heat.

I didn't sleep but a few hours and then I awoke.  I got up and checked the faucet and found it had stopped dripping, so I turned it up a wee bit higher.  I put water in the kettle.  I came back to crawl into the warm bed and snuggle into the covers and suddenly I was in the home I lived in as a teen.  It was a big old house in the country and there we did all the things I had done this night to prepare for the winter weather.  I recalled how very cold my own room had always been.  I'd wrap up in sweaters and blankets and do my homework sitting on the bed, periodically warming my icy fingers. At night I'd crawl under the covers with a lovely electric blanket over me and a heavy quilt atop the spread and read chapter after chapter of my library book or listen to music.

It was odd to me to remember that room, in that house.  That home was my least happy part of childhood to be honest and I seldom recall days there, though I can walk the rooms via memory any day, a familiar place where I know I do not belong and did not then.  It was a season I had to walk through.  

Why it was that home should be so clear to me in the wee hours this morning is beyond me.  Perhaps because it was cold...I was cold.  And the cold of that home penetrated to the very depth of my soul, not just my physical body.  It was there I realized that I didn't belong to the family into which I'd been born, that I was not wanted, that I was alone.

But even seasons of that sort have worth.  I began to write in this home, to journal and explore through reading more than just juvenile romance and the English countryside to which I longed to flee.  I explored my aching soul and I found, for the first time, God.  I try to remember this in any hard season now, that each one is here to teach us something, to show us something we haven't seen before.

Caleb is finally in Montessori school full-time.  It's a rather casually scheduled thing.  It's a good school, but the Doctor of Education who runs it is about my age I think, and her husband is retired so the schedule is not only loosely based on the county school calendar but also upon her own personal schedule, and whim, etc. Caleb went back last Monday but missed Tuesday because they closed for the proposed bad weather and then again on Friday for a training day and on Monday for Martin Luther King Day.   So, it's all a bit iffy and means I am on standby for the odd days, as well as picking him up each afternoon as they close at 5pm.  Cody, Katie's partner, will keep Caleb and his daughter on the days that he has off from the school system, so that is helpful, but his county days don't line up with ours exactly.  

I've had more of my time returned to me, which is lovely and has meant I've gotten loads of things done over the past week.   It's also meant, as I sorted out closets and drawers, that I've had time to think hard back over the events of the last five years, especially those times in which I kept Caleb more often than not.  And how difficult I found it to adjust my mind, attitude and heart to the things that were required of me at the time. This in addition to trying to balance the needs of my walking wounded, not quite stable at the time, daughter and my husband who admitted feeling jealous and selfish of my time. I was overwhelmed.  I admitted it then and I admit it now.  I barely managed most days to get through the days attempting to meet the needs of others, often neglecting myself because I was too tired to even attempt to add one more thing to my days.

People told me constantly that what I was doing for Caleb would be the making of him...and perhaps, perhaps.  But what no one told me was that Caleb would forever change me.   I discovered that my mothering/nurturing instinct is strong, stronger when it comes to my grandchildren.  Not to say I am true and right in all of my choices or decisions, but my instincts hadn't died.   I did the best I could with less concern of whether or not I was doing it perfectly, and with the daily knowledge that where I failed, I could attempt to set that right within minutes rather than never.  That was different than in years past.  I have realized that I will make mistakes.  They won't prove fatal, and I can try, try, again.

But I struggled hard in other ways.  I overstepped Katie's parenting at times.  I lost patience more than I ought to have done when others failed to help.  I allowed myself to be so consumed with the immediate needs before me that I failed to notice that others were struggling and suffering and that caused a rift in the family.  Overwhelm, distraction, busyness, weariness, might well have been the reasons I gave...I failed. 

But there is Caleb.  He made me laugh, be more compassionate to the sensitivities of others especially those, frustrated me and taught me to keep trying.  He brought me a patience of character I had never before quite grasped.  He reminded me of the wonder of being a child in this great wide world.  He reminded me that I love natural things and how much I wanted to impart that love to him and the other children. He pushed me to do the things I least felt like doing. He taught me to stop and love in the moment and not push away hugs and snuggles and kisses until it was convenient.  He grew me.  

I learned to let Katie be the healthier person she'd become through diligence upon her own part.  I learned to take John's needs not as another demand but as part of the things I must do, just as he took my own needs seriously.  We learned the importance all over again of consciously taking time to reconnect and check in, not just on one another but on our marriage.   I learned to stop demanding more and to take what I could get when it came to time.  Towards the end, when I'd ceased to struggle against the bars that prevented my doing the things I wanted, when I had ceased to feel trapped, I found myself humming along in my daily routine, happy, certain of myself in a way I hadn't been in a long while and resentful when that was interrupted. 

Those cues I'd missed of another's confusion and hurt exploded and rent our family.   

My lovely Bess has left the family for the time.  I won't say permanently, but for a time, God willing.  She got a mental health diagnosis last summer that we none of us understood.  As difficult as we found it to navigate Katie's own mental illness, it's harder to handle Bess's.  Katie's condition is under control, owing in great part to her willingness to pursue help when medications fail to work any longer, to work through therapy and through painstaking processes of controlling behaviors.   

Bess's condition is different.  Hers is unlikely to respond to medications and ongoing therapy is required.  Unfortunately, it is also a condition that is very resistant to wanting/seeing the need of therapy.

Do not for one moment think I am in any way against Bess.  She has been a good wife, an excellent mother, a loving daughter and daughter-in-law. I considered her a friend.  We were all aware in the past year or two that something odd was going on with her, something we could none of us put our finger upon.  We thought perhaps, given the number of years married, that Sam and Bess had hit one of those rough patches that come along in every marriage, when things are just hard and difficult and lonely.  We thought perhaps, given her struggles with other things that was rearing its ugly head once again.  But it wasn't that.  There came that mental health diagnosis which none of us really understood or took time to research.  And then suddenly, or so it seemed, the words separation and then divorce were uttered.  Bess walked away from marriage, from children, from family.   She seems to be running away but running hardest from herself.  

My son and his children are hurting and struggling to comprehend something that makes no sense at all to them.  We, as a whole family unit, in-laws and blood, are struggling.  It hurts to see others hurting.  It hurts to have to relinquish a hold on someone who is deeply loved, but now unknown.  It hurts to see a daughter, a wife, a sister, a friend struggling and unwilling, unable to find a foothold in a desperate situation. 

Mental illness has robbed us of much over these past years.  There was Granny's dementia, the suicide of a friend, and 3 family members.  There was Katie's own struggles with a mental diagnosis and the years we watched her fight hard to get a toehold on that.  And now Bess.  

Of all the things we've faced, of all the struggles we've had over the years, this fight for the mind, is the most difficult because the enemy is so unknown, so difficult, so consuming for those who dwell within it and those who are watching from the outside are either as consumed or unable to cope.  

It was this, balanced by Katie's blessing of a healthy relationship and ability to move on with her life at last, and our renovations, that we've dealt with over the holiday.  Deep hurt balanced with deep happiness.  Loss balanced by blessing.  A new season, a difficult one in some ways, a pleasanter one in other ways.

How do we go on?  We do what we must.  We do the daily rounds of things that are sometimes meaningless and sometimes rocks we cling to when emotions, life, flood over us and overwhelm.  We take one step and then another.  We lean harder on God and pray more and more that it is in Him we trust above all, despite the circumstances.  We lean into the happy things, the pleasant things. I recall that bit of wisdom gleaned a few months ago from the movie "Oklahoma!".  We look at the good on one side and the bad on the other and say, 'Well all right then', and go on.

We lament.  No one ever wants to mention lament and its power when grieving.  I've reminded Sam that crying is as necessary as all the other things.  

Sam is doing all the things.  He's not found another job.  He's struggling to be mom and dad. He tells me of Isaac's issues and Millie's and cries because he doesn't know what to do to help them. I see Josh's stoic, shut in look and know that he is suffering as well.  I see the hurt in my son's eyes.  I hear him saying how much he loves his wife; how much he just wants things to be the way they once were.

Yesterday Millie was here for a bit.  As we sat together at the dining table and played with Barbies, put together puzzles, etc., she talked.  "My mom likes to do this..."  "My mom puts together puzzles with me."  "My mom..."  Each time she spoke my heart ached. I murmured, "Yes, she does..."  I want her to hold on to these memories of her mom.   

In the past, as I dealt with the issues surrounding Katie's life, I didn't talk of what was going on over much, except to hint.  But I've had enough.  I'm tired of sitting in silence on this side of the screen, with an aching heart and not speaking of the things that batter us and leave us bleeding.  Mental illness sucks on so many levels.  It isolates us enough without remaining silent about it.  

Pray for dear Bess, for Sam and the children.  Lift them up please. Pray for us all. 

Amazon Associate Affiliate Link:  If you use this link to shop through, I will earn a small commission on some of your purchases if your check out within 24 hours of placing items in your cart.  Thank you!