long time passing

Usually when I write it feels like a good thing, like if I’m not even really sure what I’m talking about at least I’m admitting that hey, I’m not sure here, but I’m writing it out. The past couple of months I’ve felt too unsure to write much, too unsure to open the pages and to put anything down, and this has somehow not made things better. I wouldn’t call it a writer’s block, I’ve never liked that term, because it makes it seem that all there is to writing is, well, the writing and it’s more than that. But what I have come across lately, that makes some sort of sense of all this, is that researchers studying creativity have found that people need to feel safe to be creative. 

Much of this research is being applied to the workplace, this of course, being the dominant place for most people’s lives (sarcasm). I shouldn’t go off on a tangent here about home not being a safe place for way too many people, women, especially, because, my brain is too tired for tangents lately, and this, this is partly why I’ve been not writing. I’ve been too tired from trying to shake off my past, trying to dart in and out of my family of origin, like time travel, like portals, like something sci-fi where your whole head is just not wrapping around the information that is coming in.  

This past week we moved my mom from her three bedroom condo in Edina into a one bedroom senior apartment in Northern, Minnesota. To a town just at the Canadian border, this I know, I drove the one hour into Winnipeg years ago with my two youngest. My oldest sister and her husband live there, and they are happy to be able to spend more time with my mom. This is actually a wonderful thing, a good thing for my mom, as her days in her condo this past year were getting increasingly difficult. It just has been a lot of me interacting with family members I don’t see very much, and realizing that family often just doesn’t not only not feel like family, they often feel like enemies. They feel like the ones you have to suit up for to protect yourself, and even feeling like this feels really awful, but then you have to admit it to  yourself, admit it and know it is true. 

It is also that I have been very close to my mom, for my whole life. For my whole life we have never lived more than an hour’s drive away from each other. For my whole life, I have somehow been the one my mom felt she could rely on. Being a daughter has been a large part of my life. Now I know this part of my life is not over, but it is changed dramatically. Between the managing this change, and going through the things my mother didn’t take with her, I find myself inserted into my past, like I have abruptly fallen through a portal to the past, remembering things and feelings that I’d just as soon forgotten. 

Suddenly remembering how unsafe I felt most of my growing up years, and then realizing how it’s taken me a long, long time to feel safe more often than unsafe. And so as I shake this feeling of sadness, grief and not-safe, I realize that to write out our feelings, to write out our pain, requires a modicum of safety. If I can step back into that safety, I can make sense, I can create, and in this circle of safety create my way either to, or back to a life that makes sense. I am retrieving that child that I was, carrying her out of the debris that was my life, and I don’t have time for the making sense of it yet.