Learning to be 46, interrupted by a titmouse

Upside-down titmouse says “hi!”

I am 46. That feels very weird. But I can't dispute it and I don't really want to. Maybe when I am 80 I will look back at this post and think "what an innocent young chicken I was then... and I probably am. But I feel changed in my bones, these last few years. They have been hard, sad, joyful, full of life and death years. My roots are growing deeper, searching for the streams deep underground to sustain me. I am leaning in instead of running away. I am more whole, finding pieces of myself back on the old paths where I tried to discard them in frustration and self-disgust and fury, parts of myself I didn't want and hurled into the woods hoping the passage of time would cover them with leaves and debris until they were just gone. No. as soon as I went looking, there they were, waiting for me, to be picked up and held tenderly. They are mine, and I shall learn to treasure these rejected pieces of me and let them grow in to my wholeness.

Today I woke up and didn't want to feel the way I felt. I wanted to feel happier and began a mental self-motivating routine when I stopped- and let myself be. It's okay for me to feel this non-happy feeling. If Jesus appeared in front of me the first thing I would do was cry, I think. Cry for hours, days, weeks. He is like the mom who comes to pick up the child from daycare who held it in all day and looked fine on the outside and completely falls apart with mom, who is safe. Yes, I would cry and cry and cry until all the crying was done, and then- "I will every tear from your eyes. We will do it together. One by one until they are all dry." 

I walk with my father and let him cry. Impulses to try to ward off the tears jump through my nervous system and I take a deep breath and remind myself there is no need to do that. It is okay to just let him feel what he feels until he doesn't need to feel that thing anymore. Just let myself be who I am- and allow him to be who he is, in this moment, right now. We are walking in strange, uncharted territory, this place where my mom no longer walks beside us, where she will not come. We can only go toward her, but each day and hour is closer when we will take the same path we saw her take with joy on her face. I think about that moment, the second time in my life I saw someone see that door into heavenly places open. The expression of pure delight, looking beyond this world, to a place our hearts ache to be when we catch the smell of it on the wind. 

I know that taking a walk with my father is a thing I will only be able to do for so long. That is a strange place to be. Existing in this in between, turned-upside down place of grief and joy that I know is only temporary, but a temporary that could last until tonight or a decade from now. 

I constantly have to allow myself to exist here and now, in this season where everything is changing and unfamiliar. The role I have held for the last 19+ years as a mother and adult daughter is changing. I am on a train where the scenery outside is transitioning to something very different and it makes me nervous. I find myself scanning the horizon of my acquaintances for older women who have been here already and might help orient me. Hah! A tufted titmouse interrupts the flow here by landing above my living room window and looking in at me upside down, this way and that. Then he flies around the corner to the other window and sits on the back of a deck chair and looks in from that angle. What is this place where the humans and dog beasts are gathered? He zips away and then lands again on an overhanging branch with a seed to eat while he observes our ways. I’d probably feel a lot better if I stopped sitting here scrunched up drinking coffee and went outside into the crisp air and observed his world for a while, briskly exerting myself in the process. In other words, a walk. Good day, sirs and mesdames, I must be off.