breathing underwater

or what i've learned about grief and joy

Summer has finally found the Inland Northwest.

We hit the nineties this week and next week will be slipping into back to back days of over one hundred degrees. It seems to do this every year and somehow it still catches me completely off guard. One day we’re in jackets and long pants, the next we’re fanning ourselves and seeking the comfort of air conditioning. I planted zinnia seeds at the beginning of June that began to sprout and then were taken out by back to back freak hail storms. I wore a jacket last week in the middle of the day. It happens quickly and those who have lived here a long time say that summer doesn’t really start until July 5th. I can attest that this seems to be true.

I have had mixed feelings about summer ever since I was a child. In the Southeast, summer meant not only heat but humidity. Prepping to go anywhere midday meant you needed to start your car ahead of time and have it cooling down a solid five to ten minutes before getting inside—and that was if it was parked in a garage. I puddled easily and could listen as my funky, little arrhythmic heart beat out of time while watching the heat rise in ripples across the pavement. We survived by rising early before the sun was high or by living in a body of water.
There was no in between.

When I moved to the Northwest, I didn’t miss the intensity of a Southern summer. There were aspects I missed—the sound of frogs as night fell, eating shaved ice when it was too hot to walk, diving deep in the lake in order to find cool springs—but over all, the “second shower” I received from the humidity was not something I’ve ever mourned until late. As I’m beginning to crest the hill towards 40, my body is changing and my skin has never been so dry. Recently, I sat near the Spokane River and felt the sun crackle my face that I had diligently coated with SPF and wished for an ounce of humidity. Yes, the South’s heat is brutal, but the women don’t appear to age for a very long time, and now I know why.
It’s a curse and it’s a blessing.

did he bamboozle me into getting overpriced ice cream at 10am? yes. yes he did. he’s a true boy of summer.

blessings, curses, cursed blessings

Sam has been in occupational therapy for well over six months and the change we see in him is infinitesimally incremental, at best, but as a mom of a kid with a lot of trauma flowing through his veins, I’m always jazzed to see any change for the better.

Lately Sam has been allowing me to stay in the waiting room while he and his therapist do “big work” together in the therapy area. It seems every time they come out she is bragging on how well he’s doing and how she’s not needing to cue him as much. This also gives me a chance to sit in the car and read a book or walk around the neighborhood and attempt to get in a few steps. It’s been a good change of pace and I’ve been so proud of how brave and determined Sam has been in these sessions.

So obviously might heart shattered when a little boy in our neighborhood came running up to me the other day and said, “Sam is bad. He likes to hurt me. Why is he bad?”

Now, I know that this is the age of black and white thinking—I understood that what this child was actually saying was “Sam plays rough and I got hurt and I don’t like that.” Fair enough. I also knew that Sam had not hit this child out of anger, but from poor personal boundaries. None of this was a surprise, so I leaned down and said, “Buddy I’m sorry you got hurt. I’m sure Sam didn’t mean to hurt you. He does play pretty rough sometimes. Did you tell him that you didn’t like how he was playing? I bet he would play differently if you told him to stop. He really likes playing with you.” What came after this moment was what tore my heart in two:

“I don’t like Sam and I don’t want to play with him ever again.”

Again, I could “logic” my way out of this moment, but my mother’s heart couldn’t. I am always the mom that, in a group of kids, is approached first because of how Sam plays. It’s exhausting to constantly be approached by children and parents, no matter how kind their intentions are, telling me about what my son is doing. That said, it’s even more exhausting to always be in a place where my son’s energy is rarely matched. Yes, he tends to play rough, but he can take it just as much as he can dish it out. He gets knocked down and nine times out of ten, he pops back up again—no tears, no whines.

The worlds be builds in his mind are big and boisterous. His brain works at light speed and he’s ready to be the bad guy, the good guy, the resurrected guy at any moment. He’s imaginative and tenacious, and he loves people with his whole body. I have never seen him strike another child out of frustration (David and I, however, are the exception to that rule). The kid has got some serious grit, and it’s rare for us to find kids who are as “gritty” as Sam.

There is nothing accursed about my son, other than what was done to him against his will. How he plays is also how he lives. There are battles in our home that will never see the light of day because the average person wouldn’t be able to make sense of it. He’s bold, knows his own mind, and all of his emotions are turned up to eleven at all times. We tear our hair out on a daily basis. There is not a day that goes by that I don’t cry. But there also isn’t a day that goes by where Sam doesn’t reveal a bit more of his true self to us, and we are stunned and mesmerized at the absolute miracle he is.

One evening before bedtime, Sam and I were reading “We’re Going on a Bear Hunt” by Michael Rosen, which is one of our favorites (so much so that I wrote an entire ‘stack about it). If you’ve read the book, you know the family goes in search of a bear and finds one, and then scurries home as the bear pursues them even to their front door. On the final page of the book, you see the bear, head slumped and shoulders low, walking back to his cave. The body language of the bear clearly shows disappointment and Sam picked up on it right away.

Mama, it looks like he just wanted to play with them.
Maybe so buddy.
Now he looks sad. Why didn’t they play with the bear?
I think they were scared when he started chasing them.
But he just wanted to play!

He just wants to play.

in my bed, currently

In a past therapy session, my therapist talked to me about grief and joy and how they’re really two sides of the same coin. I couldn’t believe what she was saying—these two things were as opposite to one another as they could be. Everyone wanted joy and no one wanted to experience grief. She explained;

When grief is in your bed, joy is in the next room. They never leave one another because that’s the human existence. The one you are experiencing now won’t stay close to you forever, but it will come again. They rotate and they go hand in hand. And more so, without experiencing one, you can’t fully appreciate the other.

How many seasons have I slept right next to grief, begging it to leave? And how many seasons of joy did I gloss over and ignore, not realizing how sweet it was?

While I am by no means a wizened sage, I have experienced enough of both to see how thankful I am by what they have taught me. I pay attention a little better these days and I’ve noticed that in one season, the other is at the door, knocking ever so softly. I’ve slept next to joy and held hands with grief. I’ve been shackled to grief and cried for joy to find me, and it did (but rarely in the ways I thought it would).

brave + gentle

Sam jumped through the sprinkler the other day and my heart broke looking at him. His legs have been hurting a lot lately because he’s growing, and he’ll wake up crying and asking us to rub them.

This boy—this impossible boy—is growing.

It’s so bittersweet. His relationships are evolving and so is he. There is frustration and pain and loss but there’s sweetness too. Sam is growing and so are we.

At the beginning of the year, we picked two words we wanted to focus on in 2024. We printed them out and had them laminated and tacked them up in different places around the house that we would see often. We’ve needed the reminder.

We chose brave and gentle.

Parenting a child with front-loaded trauma means that you have be both of these things. And before we could be them with Sam, David and I have learned that we must first be them with ourselves.

Joy and grief. Brave and gentle. Two sides of the same coin. To understand one, you have to learn the other. You have to experience the other.

I know that for many people, we will be the family that might be too much. Some will look at us as a ministry opportunity—a way to grow and stretch their family’s capacity for grace. It’s not a good feeling, knowing that for some we won’t ever really be able to come as we are. Some will see us coming and batten down the hatches. But there’s not a lot I can do about that. We will make friends and lose friends. But maybe we will end up with a smaller pool of friendships that will see the grit as a strength and won’t feel threatened by it.

And maybe we’ll find folks who can swim with us in the pool of grief and know that if you dive down deep, you’ll find joy like a fresh water spring, in an Arkansas lake, on a summer’s day in July.

Always,
Emily

P.S. Visit Arkansas.