Malleable Mind

For all of us there comes times when life doesn’t work anymore. Either we lose a job or a relationship. We have a new baby, or the babies are all grown up. What we’d been doing just doesn’t ‘do it’ for us anymore. What then?

This is September, usually a month I love, this month I am melancholy in weird ways. As I walked around the windblown waters of Lake Harriet yesterday, I was frustrated by my inability to calm my thoughts. The past rushed up against my mind like the lake against the shore, and I thought about how nearly 30 years ago, on a beautiful sunny day, on the 27th, I got married. In a church, in a beautiful white dress, had a Mass, thought with a wish and a prayer it would last forever. Not so much. It’s divided in half now, 15 years married, 15 years single. Never ever thought I’d be single for 15 years. Along the way I had to let go of most of the untruths that I held on to as truth. I had to let my life be dynamic, and let the ‘rules’ (if there is such a thing) be dynamic also.

In September, 13 years ago, I had to accept that my oldest daughter, at fourteen was pregnant. I thought my life was over, I think I had more invested in my role of being a mom than my role of being a wife. I was a newly single mom with three unruly daughters already, and felt so overwhelmed. One of the ways I measured families in those days was how well they conformed to what I thought was the ‘norm.’ I measured myself and my family this way and I believed the lies I was told about young moms. Now that wonderful grandson is 13 and so cool, so amazing and my daughter is fine. She has her ups and downs like every other person, and some struggles that pertain only to single moms, and the life questions that most twenty somethings ask themselves. I am a better person for leaving behind the idea of trying to measure people. There is no good way to measure human beings, we defy measuring. It’s an insult.

I look back though, to my life, to my struggles with these September events that bring me back through time and give me a glimpse into how I’ve been able to change, and change with the flow of life, instead of stand against it, and I’m grateful for whatever spirit it is inside or outside of us that allows us to take our own truths and hold them against untruth and see the difference. Grateful for a mind that churns up against the hope for a peaceful walk and shows me how to walk.