The Return

I have been back in Maine almost four months now. I was describing it to Stevan yesterday as feeling like being on a prolonged SCUBA dive. Apart from the dramatic physical and emotional ups and downs, it feels like I am constantly under pressure– like I am literally living inside a soupy substance that weighs on me from all sides and makes everything take longer. It’s exhausting.

 

This morning is typical. Since both my cargo trailer and the back of my truck became intolerable a month or so ago, I have simply given up on finding a good place to sleep. I just sleep inside my house every night now. It’s wonderful that I am able to do this and I am still deeply enjoying being in a real bed again, with cotton sheets and pillows after 2 years of cots and hammocks and sleeping bags. The downside is that I am unable to fall asleep because I react to my bedding, so I take Ambien. Too much Ambien. I wake up feeling unrested and achy. I also react to my own sweat because my body is constantly processing mold, so I literally sleep in a different spot in my bed every night. I have “events” like becoming reactive to my pillow or to the room, and then spend time wrestling my environment back “below tolerance.” If I can sleep at all, even with drugs, it’s a win. It’s better than feeling like I’m going to die or like I need to leave tomorrow. That was common in the first 2 months.

 

I yield mentally, mostly. I don’t fight it in my mind. I just wash and relax. I decided to prioritize routine and comfort over pristine environment. For now.

 

I can usually pull out of the yucky-morning-feeling. I drink caffeine, which I wasn’t always able to do. There are ways in which the healing process continued when I returned here (Adrenals! Woot woot!). But there are other ways that I slid backwards. I am constantly inflamed. My lower abdomen, in particular. My bladder constantly hurts, my digestion is off. I feel kind of buzzed all the time. Swollen. It’s a familiar pattern of pain and malfunction. I struggled with it the whole 17 years I lived here.

 

Mentally and emotionally, the re-entry to my hometown was intense. At first I felt like I was walking through a dream. I felt like a hologram walking through my memories of each street in my town that I’d traveled a hundred times. Many of my relationships dissolved. For a while, I concluded that those people who reached out to me or stayed in touch with me were “real friends,” but I now think that is too restrictive of a definition. It was, truly, the many people who reached out to me. But there is also a quiet way in which many other people who are not in regular contact with me can fall right into a space of connection and gentle care. My dear friends Bill and Larkspur come to mind. People who are simply willing to relate. And what can I offer as a friend? The parameters I had were unnecessary, and so they dissolve. 

 

I move through the world differently now. I’m not so reactive. I don’t preach. I feel lucky to have really basic things, like a flush toilet and a cup of tea. I feel the precariousness of any mental perspective– that the opposite is always true. I developed a very strong aversion for spending time on social media witnessing people’s mental perspectives. I hesitate deeply to put my own out into the world. I am not totally sure why I am writing this.

 

I came back here for my son. More specifically, I came back here because I had to prove to myself that I did everything I could to get back with my son, to assuage a yawning guilt and shame I feel about giving birth to a child and then leaving him. It’s a primal, visceral ache that might never go away.

 

I had to come back to learn that this ache is my ache, and not my son’s. Whatever pain he endured when he was 11, and I disappeared from his life because of this illness…it’s buried now. He has compartmentalized it, as children do. As we all do. Only later in our adult life might we bear witness to the patterns of conditioning that formed around these compartments in our psyches. We are protected from pain–thank god– and then burls grow around it, like a tree swallowing an old barbed wire fence. We remain safe. Until the conditioned patterns that kept us safe as children, start to keep us from feeling alive as adults.

 

Maybe someday my son will open the compartment. And maybe not.

 

Right now, he is fine. He is thriving. His dad is carefully and lovingly guiding him and helping him to develop the habits of a fine young man. He’s a considerate friend, he saves money and keeps his promises. He plays a lot of sports. He’s really good at school. He loves his iPhone. I stare at him in awe.

 

He is a beautiful boy. At 13, he’s growing almost an inch every month and now he’s 2 inches taller than me. I have felt so grateful to have time with him. But like most 13 year olds, hanging out with his parents is not the top priority. There’s no question that we thoroughly love each other beyond measure. But he says it’s OK with him if I return to New Mexico so that I can feel better.

 

My measure has been this: Can my health stabilize in Maine to a point where I could get a job? So far the answer is still no. My energy is not high enough that I can function without a nap every afternoon. I am able to run my two weekly rentals, which is good. I can do things like go for a hike, but I need to clear the rest of the day and the next day so I can recover. If I get a “hit”, I’m still down for a few days.

 

The most recent “hit” I took was changing the sheets in one of my rental units. I have been pleasantly surprised that I had not conspicuously reacted to any of my guests in my weekly rental units. I thought that was a possibility since I can react from hugging people here. I got through two months of guests before I had a woman who was sick. I found that I could not stand right next to her and I reacted to her bedding afterwards. I brought the sheets to the laundromat. I still feel weird 2 days later.

 

Like many mornings, I woke up today pining for the clean air in New Mexico. I can’t wait to get to the surface and take the SCUBA gear off and breathe real air. I can’t wait to get clean and stay clean for days. I just feel exhausted. Living here is incredibly hard on my body.

 

But I am glad I came back. I had to in order to “complete” a growth cycle, somehow.

 

I told myself that I wasn’t coming back to reconnect with Stevan, but that wasn’t true. There has been deep re-connection, as well as re-experiencing old patterns with a new level of consciousness. It is an irrevocable love for both of us. It never goes away. An expansion and contraction over years that has breathed us. Some of the patterns have cracked and dissolved, some may never. It is impossible to know if we will ever be able to ever be able to live together. So we love for now.

 

I have been able to experience some milestones with Gregory, my god son. I was here for his 13th birthday, I got to take him on a campus tour of Maine Maritime Academy and I was there when he surprised his dad by buying him a mountain bike. It has been a pleasure to reconnect with him. He got a puppy.

 

I have also been able to reconnect with Susan and Rosie and Willow and Jenna, four of my dearest friends here. I haven’t gotten as much time with them as I would like, but it’s pretty easy to make me happy with very little these days. I have also gotten to see my sister and brother-in-law, my dad and stepmom, my cousins, my aunt with dementia and my 92 year old family friend, Paulette.

 

It feels very much like a Hero’s Journey story. I am not of a mind that writing that story would be a valuable contribution for the world. I suppose that could change, but right now it feels very much like the most valuable contribution I can make is to show up right now, in every present moment, and to identify with the awareness rather than with the story.

 

I suppose I have written this in order to mark a turning point. This is another chapter in a story that I am no longer invested in. I am not the roles in my life. I am not a sick person. I am not my problems or my house or my story.

 

What happens next?