Time is like a river - it flows by and doesn't return.
--Chinese Proverb

Sometimes at night, just before I go to sleep, I feel this pit in my stomach, a feeling of fear and loss over all the things I can't get back, ever. It's dense and immobilizing, I have to remind myself to breathe. It's melancholy and painful, like the universe has inverted and there is nothing left but a black hole...and me. Alone. So I have to close my eyes and feel my way out of the hole. On the edge of panic, I use Andy's snoring as a guidepost. I reach out for the curl of the cat asleep next to me. I recall Rachel's "I love you" an hour before when she kissed me good night. I smell the sweat in my blankets and remember that I am here now. A soul trying to be human. A human, being.

The Saint of Lost Causes

My daughter, Rachel, attends a Catholic School called St. Rita. Recently, I asked her what St. Rita is the saint "of". Yesterday she reported to me, excitedly, that St. Rita is the Saint of the spouses of alcoholics. Today, when I googled St. Rita, I found that, more exactly, she is the Saint of impossible causes. Hmmmph! If that doesn't say a mouthful! How grateful I am--just for today--to not be lost. To be found. To be free.

Patterns in the family quilt

I spent this weekend at my sister's house in NJ. It was my nephew's 10th birthday. Family can be so difficult, right? Family members know how to push my buttons, to catapult me back into the patterns of my past. My character defects operate at 110% during a weekend with my family of origin. I become lazy, overly sensitive (read: crybaby), judgmental, and argumentative. I default to self-protection mode. I forget my own truth, I forget to stand up for myself. I forget to be accepting and gentle of my family members' defects. Three plus years into sobriety, I still forget the tenets of the 11th Step prayer when it comes to my family. Not always, not entirely...but I do find it difficult to skip out of the groove of those old recordings. And I see it manifest with the way we treat our children. But, each time I do have the opportunity and the luxury to spend time with my family, there is something I manage to do "right" (maybe "better" is a better word!). Perhaps I hold my tongue one time out of five when I want to lash out, either overtly or with underhanded sarcasm. Maybe I remember to tell my sister what a great cook she is or how nice she looks. Maybe I give my dad my undivided attention for one of his four million stories. In the end, it's about me, right? It's about what I do to change myself and to be a better sister, daughter, wife, mom. That's all I can change.

On Wednesday night, I saw "Death of a Salesman" performed at the Yale Rep. It brought up a lot of "stuff" for me. The mixture of deeply personal and broad social themes is so masterful in that play. It is the personal themes that resonated most poignantly with me though: Marital infidelity; kids facing their parents' humanness for the first time; the cost of lying to ourselves about our own truth; the destructive nature of denial, expectations and subsequent resentments....brought it all home!