The Luxury of Heartache

It’s only taken me three decades, but I’m learning to tackle my challenges head on instead of letting them fester like months-old Tupperware in the back of the fridge.

Instead of bemoaning my being out of shape, I’ve been going to the gym for two weeks.

Instead of staring at the piles of laundry, I’ve been pushing them through one load at a time, and actually putting them away.

Instead of moping and sniveling because I missed out on Christmas with my family, my husband is making time for us to visit this weekend. (Homesickness is awful.)

Instead of dwelling on my mortality and mourning my (very alive and healthy) parents, I gave them a call just to chat the other day. I had dinner to marinate and my husband was at work still, so it was a good time to chat about nothing of importance, with no rush or timeline. We talked about this and that; the big game, work, my dad’s bad knee, my sister’s newest organization project.

My two younger sisters have both moved back in with my parents, each with a taste of independence. There are few things more intoxicating than having your own space, your own things, your own air without anyone else’s hair or smells or other leavings floating about. After living in dwellings where one can stretch out both arms, turn in a circle and not hit anything, coming back to “The Compound” can be a comforting relief at best, and a stifling hell at worst.

The older sister immediately put the family on a diet. Whenever my dad makes it out of the house to buy groceries, she rearranges the entire pantry so that no one can find anything to eat. It’s like reading English in some strange dialect; silverware that lived in a drawer for twenty years now has moved to a bucket on a countertop, pasta has replaced the half dozen cereal boxes that we used to Hoover up as kids. You’re as likely to find a pound of flax seed as you are a snack cake, and forget about the Oreos. Those already got eaten.

The younger sister has taken to organizing everything else in the house. The latest undertaking includes finding bits and bobs that belong to any one of the nine tenants that have lived in this house at some time or another. I’m certain there will be a box for me to go through when I visit next.

I was fighting with my Instant Pot when my mother mentioned a letter.

“It was a letter to my mother, I’m not sure how I managed to get it back. It’s from when I was still married to my first husband, Wes. He had bought seven stamps and would only give me three, so I asked my mother to buy me a book of stamps. Your sister Sonya was just a few months old, so I would have been…seventeen.”

She kept on about why she had been so adamant that none of us become teenage mothers, but my mind was far from that conversation. I was in the midst of calming the urge to find and fight some seventy something year old man that I had never met.

At seventeen, my dear, sweet, silly, lovable mother had endured a desolation, a wrenching knot of frustration and despair that must have choked her with its tight grip on her heart those many years ago. Barely old enough to drive, but not old enough to vote, she was a girl with the responsibilities of a woman, with no money, no education, no preparation. I can only imagine how difficult it was to navigate adulthood with a baby on her hip, my mother made it certain that her daughters wouldn’t take that path. Her heartache, however, is familiar.

I know it, because I have felt it.

I have experienced nothing worse in this world than the knowledge of failure despite all my best efforts. You are drowning; you can see the light of the sky at the surface of the water, but no matter how far you stretch, your mind knows you are far below open air. Panic pulls your mind apart like dough, even as the edges of your consciousness succumb to impending loss. No matter how you struggle, you will sink, and your hard work capsizes.

The resting place of S. S. Newgrad is a bench outside of an abandoned department store, inside of a mall that thrived when MacGyver was still on the air. There were heaps of snow pushed up against the edges of the skylight above me, so foreign to an Alabama girl. In the beginning, I wanted to leave home, badly. I had struck out on my own at sixteen by choosing boarding school, and returned to The Compound for college. I counted down the days til graduation, so I could finally make my own money and have my own house with no clutter and lots of space. With diploma in hand, ink still wet, I scrambled out West. So many kind people taught me much, and while there was a lot of stress, and very little money, I kept trying. I played every card in my deck; borrowed cash from my parents, got a second job, worked every shift I could. It wasn’t enough. I wasn’t enough. I was spent and broke and broken, barely treading water as the fear of failure set in. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to go back to my parents, it’s that I couldn’t afford to go. I was hundreds of miles away, with no cash and no hope, and the loneliness was suffocating. I remember sitting on that bench at the mall, and crying, great, racking sobs, into the phone when my father said,

“Just come home.”

It was permission to fail.

To protect myself.

To heal.

So I left the Wild West, and all the new friends and snow behind. I still had my head above water, and I had almost made it back, when I had a crash landing in a ditch in Arkansas. Every tear that my friends had patiently stalled now blinded me as rain, torrents rooted in storm clouds that stretched across the entire southeast.

A state trooper let me dry out in his SUV while my bedraggled Dodge got towed out of the mud. The tow was $200, and I knew my debit card had only $300 available to me. I was too young to have any kind of meaningful credit score, much less my own card. There was no room in my mind for any thought beyond getting back into my car and onto the road. The waves of anxiety lapped over me.

There was room in my wallet, right where my debit card was supposed to be.

I called my dad. The tow truck driver couldn’t process a credit card over the phone. I had no cash. It was nearly 6pm, there were no banks open or even close by. I was trapped in between a liquor store and a strip club in West Memphis, with an unyielding unpaid tow truck driver and an annoyed trooper. The weight of my conundrum didn’t set in until my ears registered the desperation in my father’s voice. I could hear it; he had run out of aces in his deck, too. In my darkest moment, my hero was powerless to help me, and my heart broke.

For just a minute, my mind blanked and I felt resigned to bitter tears. I begged the trooper if he would just please check his floorboards one more time. I just needed one break in the waves to struggle free of the riptide that threatened me, one ray of hope to overcome the turmoil.

The card had slipped from my pocket into the Atlas that lived in the door pocket of the SUV. “Wow, I would taken off with your card!” It was enough; I could breath again.

At last, the lost card found, the driver paid, the car returned. Only through the kindness of strangers and my dad giving me GPS directions over the phone, was I able to limp to a hotel.

A puddle of that fear swells in my chest every so often, when I’m faced with others experiencing it. It tempers me, and reminds me that there is much we don’t know, that everyone is fighting a hard battle.

I have spent years building myself into the person I needed back then, a woman who does not panic but thrives in the face of adversity. More importantly, I strive to be kind. The pain in my chest would never have receded without the help of so many, from that night and onward. The world is full of sadness and failure, and it is our human duty to lift others up and celebrate joy, and acknowledge and respect pain. Heartache can illuminate our successes.

Even now, I am healing, and learning. I felt the sadness in my mother’s voice as she talked about that letter, and it settled in the bottom of my heart like wet sand. I have collected my patients’ sad stories just the same. Over and over again, like ocean waves that stun you with freezing power, the sadness of the world hits me, threatens to drown me. It is still a challenge to be kind always, to be gracious when I’m anxious, or to have love for those who’s fear threatens me. I have to practice daily, much like a household chore or a strength exercise. I’m a much stronger swimmer now; I have cultivated my joy into a life raft.