In my umpteenth hour of need this week, I took myself by the hand, led myself to a sturdy chair, and sat myself down, firmly but gently, sternly insisting I think this through carefully.
Why was I again this distressed? Was there anything new about the situation? Perhaps, only another confirmation that people are not going to see it your way. You worry you have no battle to fight. I know if there was one you’ld never desist. But it is not a bad idea to ask yourself whether it is worth standing up and going to court to try and find legal means to protect your son's mental health.
Nobody understands how much help he needs. They they just let him be when he wanders out of their reach, rushes in like a bull through a china shop, tips the applecart, fails to give a hoot. Hangs out with a noxious crowd. Spins you another nine miles of paranoid clap-trap yarn.
I know I am right. I wish I were wrong, because I like being right, upright, too damn right, right on the money: I need to be right, one step too close to the wrong and I could topple off the right path. But there is nothing to like about this. If I were wrong I could learn to be right and that is something I’d rather do than be right about this.
It’s a narrow path. There are evil intentions all around us working to broaden it. They bring in tar and heap it up, smooth it out, paint orderly lines on it. The stench should be a dead give-away, but people shrug and wait and see.
Have you seen that film where a family lives in a solitary house in the fields, with a half-built motorway in front, making use of it as an additional bit of garden patio, with no plans to leave. Even when the road finally is finished and opens, the family stays. Progressively they become victims of it, with the noise and emissions, and their response is to block out the pernicious intrusions - sound-proofing and eventually bricking up all the windows and even the vents and the front door. (“Home”, 2008, Ursula Meier). Were they right to stay? Did they make a point? Was it a free choice? Did they have a choice? How does the film end? Go see!
Those evil intentions also have a right, or even a need to be what they are. That is the manichaen way of seeing the dualistic mess we are in. It is also understanding that life is a work in progress and not a fixed form.
People need to get to work and carriageways will be built. Our rights (to be safe and healthy, private, free in our homes) are becoming hard to guarantee. We are growing reticent of our obligations at the same time. Taking things legally is not the way forward. But just sitting down and waiting for it to explode in your face can’t be right either.
Meanwhile, the trick is not to brick ourselves in with despair. Where there is life there is hope. Where there is mobility there is room for potential to form (anything). The world is my oyster, and oysters wrap up irritations in pearls. Granted the trouble I find myself in, the pending divorce from my child, is a little more than an irritation to me and my parents. Then again, as seen from the moon, also but a grain of sand.
My hand nicely patted by my reassuring self, my shoulder tenderly rubbed with care and belief in my resilience, I felt it was time to get up, do some shoulder rolls, crack a vertebrae or two and STOP BLUBBERING (as frequently told since July).
We have a right but also a duty to be busy with the things we love. DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO. I know it is hard when you don’t find love coming from the corner you had expected it to; but it is vanity and ego if you wonder how it is possible that it isn’t. It is not helping your child get the help he needs.
Letting go sure got a new dimension for me since the summer! You think it is about transitioning at first. Ok, I can do this! you say to yourself, having survived the first three devestating months. Mind, however: you don't know what letting go really is, until you find yourself with a heart stripped of its pericardium.
Still, the light-hearted - even when flayed pork pink - are probably always going to be the most elevated.
Photo top by John Gibbons on Unsplash
Photo bottom by Florian Klauer on Unsplash