Minding the tether

Stretching without breaking

You do not have to leave to arrive/ I’m learning this slowly. — Andrea Gibson

I’ve been having recurring dreams of losing my children. Not recurring as in the same dream every time. It’s different dreams every time— lurid and often bizarre— but in each one at some point I realize I’ve lost my child. I have no idea where they are.

Whichever of my children appears in the dream (it’s never both of them at the same time) they are young. Infants, sometimes, though more often toddlers. That particular slate of ages where they still have the softness that inspires tenderness and primal levels of protectiveness. Yet they are also old enough to just wander off, or to be told Stay. Just for a moment. I’ll be right back. Except in the dreams it’s usually far more than a moment and when I look around I don’t know where they are and my chest rips open. I wake in an anxious fog and have to cast my psychic net out, placing them in real time in their rooms asleep, at their father’s house, or at a friend’s just to settle my aching heart.

It makes sense these dreams keep coming. My son is slowly working towards moving out of the house finally and into an apartment with his girlfriend. My daughter is ending their junior year in high school and starting to talk for real about college. Neither of them are immediately flying the nest (god help me, the dreams when we get to that point), but it’s looming over the horizon. Clearly, some deep part of me readily rhymes loom and doom and is capable of conjuring scenes that twist them around each other.

What am I so afraid of, though? That they will make mistakes with serious consequences, sure. That I will not be there to catch them when they fall. But I suspect the larger portion of my fear is how lost I will feel in their absence. There were times in the last dozen years since my marriage to their father ended when the only thing that has kept me tethered to the Earth was the need to take care of them. Ten years ago, that first fall that we moved into our house, I experienced three of the supposedly top five stressors in adult life in about six weeks— I moved, my father died, and my divorce finalized. My cosmic bingo card clearly not yet full, I also saw my abuser for the first time in years and confronted him in a letter afterwards about what he had done. It did not go well.

During the winter that followed, if I wasn’t working or actively parenting because my kids had gone to their dad’s I sat, literally just sat, under heavy blankets in the corner of my couch. Not turning the heat up above 55 degrees. Not moving more than was absolutely required to go to the bathroom or drag myself to bed. I didn’t open mail for seven months. The piles accumulated, teetering higher and higher, until they started to tip over and I would move them to paper grocery sacks next to the coffee table. Not open them or deal with them. Just move them so another pile could begin.

The shock and grief pinned me to the couch, but my kids simultaneously tethered me to life. For them I roused myself to cook food, do laundry, go to Quaker Meeting. For them I continued to try to be here fully, to communicate, to care. I never contemplated any kind of immediate self-harm in those days, but without them I would have simply let my life fall away and drift into nothingness slowly but surely.

Things are different now. I’m more firmly tethered to life for my own sake. But I am also aware of the ways in which I still stay fully present for the meaty, material, embodied work of my life for them. And that my deepest daily intimacy, my primary sense of connection to all the messy, tender, poignant complexity of being human in a web of other humans is with them.

It makes me wonder how much of our resistance (when we have any) to our people’s choices, our idea that what they are doing is wrong, is fueled less by any moral sense of the world and more out of fear of the loss of connection. That deep down we fear their actions will loosen the tether between us and then who will we be? How will we manage to stay here?

It’s not that the people we love don’t do things that are wrong sometimes. Of course they do. All of us are awash in the most imperfect humanity. Mistakes and transgressions are inevitable, and how we hold those inevitable infractions can absolutely affect our connection, sometimes rightfully so. But I guess I’m thinking more about how we (how I) flounder in anticipation of what’s to come, which is, of course, unknowable. How I rush to control and judge out of fear that what my people choose will take them away from me.

I’ve said here many times that integrity is a social technology, that it’s about the moral quality of the choices we make as we bump up against each other. In other words, integrity is relational. But relationship involves other people, yes? It’s not just about us, how we manage our own choices and effect on other people. It’s also about the people we’re connected to and how we manage their choices.

Can we stay grounded in our own sense of what matters, practice our own integrity, while allowing what matters to others to dictate their direction? Can we hold our loved ones with an open hand when necessary, allowing them to expand, move away, and evolve in ways we don’t understand (that don’t, ultimately, have anything to do with us) while also holding them close in our hearts?

I went into my daughter’s room this morning to wake them up and say goodbye before I headed off to work and they headed off to their final day of classes. What is it about sleep that functions like a time machine, like all our prior selves rush to the surface? They hoisted themselves up off the pillow when I came in, their hair sticking out in all directions. “You made it!,” I exclaimed. “Your last day!” A fuzzy hint of a smile lit up their face, the left side scrunching up like Popeye, and all of a sudden I could see their three-year old self again. The fairy-like imp they used to be instead of the self-possessed young woman they are. I imagined sending that little imp out into the world and wanted to take it all back, to throw my arms around them, crawl back under the covers together, and stop time entirely.

For a moment, I would have happily questioned every choice, argued against every idea they have about what to do with their life that might take them away from me. My chest ripped open even wider. God, help me, I thought. How am I ever going to survive this?

I didn’t grab them, though. Instead I kissed them gently, chuckled a little about their bed head, and let myself out their bedroom door. As I then let myself out of the house and walked down the street to the bus, I felt the tether stretching between us. Stretching, but not breaking. I imagined them flying far, far up above me, like the kites on the National Mall when I was a kid, and remembered the delight I felt witnessing their swooping and gliding. The sense of fear when they looked like they might crash down and then the sense of triumph when they turned upwards again.

Please, help me, I sent winding out into the ether. Please help me keep us tethered. Please help me revel in their flight.

How are you minding your tethers these days?

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