Growing pains
Yesterday was one of those nonstop days where everything just keeps getting pushed further out till day and night run together into one long dreamy sequence.
I spent the day moving this bad daddy of cupboards into the house:
This was one of those purchases I did not want to pass up – I needed a cupboard and cabinet space and this one screamed to me from the get go. It’s all cypress and was taken out of a house uptown and it fit perfectly into the kitchen and I get to pay it off in installments until August next year. Plus I got it for half the price because I boldly asked for it.
I then segued into a hastily prepared lunch of fatoush salad, penne with lemon and shaved parmesano reggiano, asparagus with brown butter. Wala – lunch is served. And Tin got his playdate that has been a long time in the making:
Tin’s playmate is eight years old and though half his age, Tin followed his friend, doing cannon balls in the pool and swimming across the pool underwater like a fish. This morning, Tin rode his bike like he had been doing it forever. I realized as I watched Tin doing what had been a huge feat just two days ago that the reason he has been high and low and psycho lately is he has had growing pains.
I remember growing pains as a pre-teen; I would lay in bed with achey muscles and joints, but now as an adult my growth hurts me more in the soul, and in my head and my heart. Perhaps these same areas hurt when I was young, but I was not given context or vocabulary to identify them as such instead I just felt the pain deep in my bones.
I watched Tin up close and from a far the past week. He had three little girls in tears in the spate of 24 hours – his friend Violeta, the mover’s daughter Kelley, and his playdate’s sister, Amaris. I told him his record was not looking too good. Meanwhile, he was over emoting to his playdate who he was meeting for the first time, wanting to hug him up till the young boy was starting to stand back.
Scaring girls and identifying with boys.
It must be what I’d now call unidentifiable soul growth.
We went to visit with friends yesterday evening, and Tin devolved into a tangled web of angst – throwing himself on the floor, crying for no reason, having an urgent need to look just like Tin Tin the cartoon character by having his pants rolled up just so, and generally wanting to be in my lap between Katy-bar-the-door tantrums.
My friends just watched in horror.
While the adults grooved to one after another of Anthony Hamilton’s crooning soulful songs, Tin found new places to meltdown and I listened to a woman telling me she had “just been through something” and that every time she thought she was clear, “the tide would rise back up” and she’d get “smacked down, again and again,” she said as she beat her fist into her hand, “by competing forces coming from all directions” – she took a deep breath, and opened her chest wide, then exhaled and said, “I’m finally coming out of it” and I nodded knowingly as I mirrored her posture and took a deep breath before saying with a smile, “I too, had a similar bout, and one thing I learned was to quit dragging that poor pitiful narrative around” – she shook her head; she said her pitiful story was running on fumes … almost done.
And it was high time for it to die.
The good thing about being a kid and having growing pains is you are sort of oblivious – you can’t articulate what it is that is happening to you, so it becomes this bad mood that passes in a day, a week, or weeks, but once gone, it gives up its ghost to wisdom and wonder.
If only adults had the same mechanism for processing what we can articulate but all too often wear as the too-tight clothes of yesterday’s pain, letting our cedar trunks overflow with sad mementos of regret, unable to let loose the clutch that rises up to stop us every time we try to open our chest and shout ENOUGH!
The woman thanked me as I was leaving and said, “I appreciate your listening” but I told her, as I would tell any of you, “oh no, thank you; you and I, we’re soldiers on this journey, we’ve walked through a battlefield together, we’ve grown, and now we’re on the other side.”
As my friend was telling me earlier in the day – about a man she was dating who didn’t want her to ever speak about her past – but she said “I have one” and I laughed out loud and said, “Indeed, I am a woman with a past.” We all have a story to tell, and the beauty of life is our story gets to be edited, modified, rewritten, enhanced, embellished, and revisited many many times, till we get it right.