Dear Sister,
A million months ago back in June (by COVID-time counting), you texted me that you felt very sad about your impending move away from home in Texas to across the country in Boston. I wrote down some thoughts at the time, and then cried over them, because I, too, still felt (and feel) very sad about existing so far from home. A few months ago I was wrapped in the anxiety of what was happening in our world: pandemic as separation; Earthly destruction as a true loss of Home; Trump’s probable success in the next election as the final beginning of the end for American democracy. I was as discomfited then as I am today, but I think I have some words to clarify and express that pain in an attempt to soothe it as well.
Despite being well into classically defined adulthood, it is still difficult to come home to Mom and Dad, and then depart again. This is much more difficult than when we were teenagers leaving for college: it was the right and natural thing for us to depart for school, “finally” on our way out of the house. And it would take several years into semi-adulthood to discover how lucky we were to have the parents and childhood that we did; and also how special it is to be at our home as adults, and stay for extended amounts of time with the parents. But we know we cannot stay indefinitely as adults: to move back “home” would be a sort of flailing and failure on our part. And also a failing on the part of the parents who spent so many years nurturing us so that we could leave them bit by bit until at last we will be out there in our own way, big and bright enough to create our own self-sustaining worlds. The source of the pain of repeated departure from our parents stems from the unspoken promise given to us by Mom and Dad throughout our entire lives: we know we can always go home and they will be there for us, but we ourselves know as adults that it is impossible to go back Home as we once knew it.
Home as we knew it was first and foremost safe, comfortable, loving and fun (interspersed with bouts of challenging times, especially during the bumpy and emotionally charged teenage years; chores*, tears, getting a “check” for being bad or getting grounded from playing out in the cul-de-sac, spelling homework and crying over said spelling homework at the dinner table, etc.) Our lives as children with Mom and Dad were on the whole, wonderful: they created a family in which we children were allowed to roam and range free, yet safe within their gravity of orbit. They raised us as pilgrim stars, giving us our own little lights to nurture as we orbited around their incredibly bright beings. We stretched and to this day continue to stretch out in every widening concentric circles, swooping back in times of need, and spinning away (and not bothering to call or text) when we are caught up and dazzled by our own lives. As we entered (or on some days, continue to enter) into adulthood, we slowly but surely replace the safety of their orbit with the uncertainty and very real perils of being out on our own.
Yet we cannot get back to that original orbit of existing within the safe confines created by Mom and Dad, a sort of Eden that exists only in hindsight. The other, more deeper source of pain stems from also beginning to recognise those repeated departures for what they are: small rehearsals for the real thing, when we can no longer orbit in their gravity as the central star of light and love in our lives because their lives no longer exists on our plane. The real perils of adulthood, or as David Whyte calls it “the great measure of human maturation,” is when we begin to understand: “that we move through life in the blink of an eye; that we are not long with the privilege of having eyes to see, ears to hear, a voice with which to speak and arms to put around loved ones; that we are simply passing through.”
All the while when we are passing through this life, we have both the pull of the unattainable past when we leave home, and we have the knowledge of a devastating grief that awaits us one day, causing us pain.** Yet still we are in motion, pilgrims on the move and it isn’t enough that repeated departure from Mom and Dad is painful, but there is the strong current of anxiety from constantly going from what Whyte calls this to that. The departure from this, your leaving home after spending several quality weeks living with Mom and Dad, to that, your living in Boston with your soon-to-be-husband Mikey, is fraught with the unknown.
Back in June I didn’t have the words to tell you what to do with that pain or anxiety, or words to soothe it, other than that “it is very difficult.” And today several months later as you are about to get married, I am reminded that it is still difficult as physical distance, no matter the technology, only makes that feeling worse, particularly if the world around us seems to be in tatters. There is no comfort to leave loving and supportive parents, who have been a bedrock and protectors to us a humans since the day we were born, for an uncertain future out in the wide world beyond.
But lo! Mom does have some wisdom to soothe the anxiety, and it has been staring us in the face for well over a decade. In fact, she sent it to me when I was in Oaxaca in the summer of 2010, volunteering for Amigos and sleeping next to a chicken coup, always in a semi-state of anxious agitation from the lack of familiarity anywhere. Above the now-extinct landline phone in our Texas home, Mom has a poem tacked up on the cork board:
You Are There
by Erica Jong
You are there.
You have always been
there.
Even when you thought
you were climbing
you had already arrived.
Even when you were
breathing hard,
you were at rest.
Even then it was clear
you were there.
Not in our nature
to know what
is journey and what
arrival.
Even if we knew
we would not admit.
Even if we lived
we would think
we were just
germinating.
To live is to be
uncertain.
Certainty comes
at the end.
I think of this poem often, especially when the uncertainty of the future seems overwhelming. For you to leave home and Mom and Dad is a physical act of separation and a liminal passing of one form of adulthood to the next, from this to that: home will now be wherever you and Mikey will find yourselves, and no longer solely articulated with Mom and Dad. Both of these things, your moving to start a new chapter of adulthood with Mikey in Boston; and you leaving the safety of our childhood orbit while our current world teeters, reflects a certain truth from Pema Chodron: that “things fall apart and come together again.”
This is the constant exchange of existence, an “unceasing tidal and seasonal becoming,” as Whyte calls it. And I can feel it every Autumn, and I feel it today at the beginning of October in Scotland, when the light looks different through the trees and becomes more vibrant and softer against the coloured leaves. As we know, most of the pain and anxiety occurs in the “falling apart” portion of the equation, but I don’t think Nature gets anxious about it (although, I don’t speak Tree or Squirrel or Geese): there is beauty in Nature from the falling apart of Summer into Autumn. There is also beauty and light from you and Mikey’s marriage, and nothing brings to mind “coming together again” than a marriage. The act is a blinding bright star being born unto your own, and a wholly worthy reason to “fall apart”, or more firmly depart, from Mom and Dad.
We are incredibly lucky that Mom and Dad continue to be bright, central stars and engines of gravity in our lives. The own worlds we have created and continue to create are a testament to their foundational gifts. I still find it very difficult to be away from Mom and Dad. But then I don’t want to imagine a life other than the one I’m living here in Scotland with Seb, except when it is to imagine in Whyte’s words, “the precious memory of then with the astonishing but taken for granted experience of the now,” with the ever evolving “just about to happen” that we have to work to create. Boston is calling and what a pair of stars you and Mikey make as you come together in marriage.
Love always,
Claire
*Remember when we thought it would be clever if we swapped chores when Mom and Dad were out? I cleaned the bathtub, and you cleaned the toilet and sink, or some such arrangment. When they came home, we got told off for not doing a good enough job for our assigned tasks!
** No fucking thank you- no wonder to move away from Mom and Dad is so hard and painful! Sign me up for the express train back to teenage-years, where one weekend we ate together a half gallon of Rocky Road Blue Bell in one sitting , while watching Pride and Prejudice upstairs, please.
CLB Collins 