Fall                                                                                 Healing Moon

I missed seeing Kate yesterday for the first time since that Friday when we went to the Swedish Hospital’s E.R. And, I missed seeing Kate.

Odd experience yesterday. I led an exercise that involved body outlines I made from this template. (they actually looked better than this picture might suggest.) The kids responded to several prompts, among them: first school memory, early friends, where were you born, childhood hobby, childhood dream, then illustrated them on their body outline. The results are beautiful in many cases, revealing in all of them.

They were into it, using markers and crayons and stickers. The latter many of them used to decorate their faces as well. It felt energetic and engaged, the exercise, but I couldn’t get a conversation going about the results, so it felt like a failure to me. Alan, on the other hand, thought it was a great success. So did all the teachers who looked at the results.

The idea was to get the kids thinking about their childhood as they shift from childhood to being a teen. And, in that sense, yes, it worked. Where it failed was in having a discussion about commonalities and differences among the results.

Afterward, like the first two times I taught, all I wanted to do was sit down. Like a hard workout. Exhaustion. Attending to the little sprays of emotion, provocations of other students, even their eagerness and desire to do a wonderful job (which most of them had) was difficult. At least for me. Very difficult.

At the staff meeting afterwards exhaustion and an attendant lability found me looking out at the others: Rabbi Jamie, Alan, Tara, Debra, Karen, Tal from inside. Hard to describe. I was there, listening, understanding, but it was as if there was an invisible barrier of weariness between the watcher within and the physical circumstance he inhabited in that moment. I spoke very little, in spite of a fascinating introduction to the method of studying torah that resulted in the talmud.

In another instance I might have said I was depressed. The physical sensations were very similar: subdued, a feeling of distance, limited affect, low energy. That led me to my refrain over the last almost three weeks. I’m ok. No, I’m not anxious. Yes, I’m in the moment, responding to now, not imagining the future or regretting the past. I have believed that of myself, believed it was my experience, but was it?

As far as anxiety goes, I’m exquisitely sensitive. Generalized anxiety disorder will do that to you. I am, at least I think I am, an expert on my own anxious responses, what they feel like, how they manifest. As long as the ambit was Kate, her medical care, the dogs and their needs, my own needs, I felt fine. No, of course, I wasn’t joyous, nor was I unconcerned, but at no time did the usual stomach flutters, sweaty palms, shallow breathing signal an OMG moment. Was I repressing them? I really don’t think so.

But, there was a high stress level. That’s undeniable. It was a fraught situation, especially the first two weeks with Kate bombarded by tests, procedures, transfusions, and finally the bowel resection. Even so, the stress did not trigger anxiety. It did, however, exact a price and that price was exhaustion, depletion. As long as I was only handling the temporarily  resectioned world I described in an earlier post, I was fine. Being alone with all this was not a difficulty for me, in fact, I prefer it.

When, however, I took this still existing high stress level-Kate’s still gone from home, driving in and out takes a toll, for example-into a social setting, I believe it surfaced the stress in a much different way. I was no longer in my temporarily resectioned world but in that ongoing life that is the world, the ongoingness that seems so strange from within a bubble of stress or grief. Yet, it is not strange, it’s the usual, the normal, the everyday, it was my stress that was unusual.

I was not able to fully enter into the casual flow, the ordinary ongoingness. I wanted to, but the effort required was just beyond me. This doesn’t seem aberrant to me, but it did make me realize the degree of stress, of the energy required to cope that I’ve been experiencing.

Final note here: People want to help and I truly appreciate that. But, I’m not real good at knowing what kind of help I need, what would be useful. I’ve always been a very private person, one inclined to handle my life on my own terms with my own energy. I know the pitfalls in that, but it’s a lifelong habit. And, one I generally admire. Right now I think it might be in my way, but I’m not sure what to do about it.