Split Brain/Split Screen

For many years, I kept journals.  Then I stopped.  And years after that, I went back and read some of the entries.  And I was reminded of why I stopped.  The sadness that welled up inside me as I re-read some of those entries was pretty hard to take.  It made me feel like my life was a kind of merry-go-round that I couldn't figure out how to get off of, how to move to another ride, how to change the rhythm, the outcomes.

Fast forward some years to my having kids.  I decided--given the spotty nature of my actual memory--to keep journals about my kids.  That way, I'd have some version of a reliable record of who they were, and who they'd grown up to be.  I kept that going for a really long time, until my eldest was eighteen years old, in fact.  Then I stopped.  I don't think there was a particular prompt for my stopping.  It was just a lot to keep toggling among three different journals, recording entries about three different kids and the ways in which their lives were both individuated and overlapping.

And truth be told, as certain things about my kids got harder and more complicated, I didn't want to put those things in writing.  I was like the mother in To The End of the Land, who believed that if she just wasn't home, the army representative couldn't knock on her door to tell her that her son had died in combat.  It was her way of protecting him, and of protecting herself.  I think I might have had a similar notion, viz., if I didn't write it down, then maybe that meant it didn't really happen.  The magical thinking associated with that is quite powerful.  Of course it does nothing to change outcomes in the real world, but we each need whatever we need to lean on to help us get through life's challenges.  And this was one pillar of coping, for me.

Today, emerging from the office of a medical practitioner who was describing what he thinks is happening with one of my kids, I realized how pillars can hold up a house, an edifice within which you construct a life, but they can also fall, leaving you exposed, wounded, or worse.  Yet later that same day, I was reminded of the whiplash experience that in many ways defines my parenting experience when one of my other kids called to ask when we'd like to come for his commissioning ceremony.  It's a kind of cognitive craziness that's hard to describe.  It's as if I'm living my own life with my heart and my head in different worlds, at the same time, all the time.  There's no holistic anything; there's just a kind of cacophonous chaos that ebbs and flows, and rises and drowns me.  And then recedes so I can breathe.  Until the next wave comes.  Even if I'm not home to answer the door.