On faith and knowledge
and a quiet walk around a pond
Every pause between the end of one breath and the beginning of the next is long; then again, nothing is not always in transition. Soon, tomorrow, the boys will be men, then the men will leave the house… —Lauren Groff
It’s Sunday afternoon and we’re taking a walk with our dog in the scrub pines on Cape Cod. Swirly has her mouth open and a little spring in her step, stopping now and then to double back and sniff at all the orange-hued vegetation. Janyce stops as well and crouches down to study a mushroom.
“Hey, look at this,” she says, pointing to the ground where it is growing. “It’s the same one I read about this morning.”
I look in the general direction and nod. I’m thinking a mix of thoughts that switch from one random thing to another. I’m also thinking about our dog who braved the two-hour car ride.
“Remember the despair we felt in February, when we thought we’d never get out of the house again?” I grasp at a tuft of green pine needles as I walk past, pulling the group of them off the branch, rolling their sticky ends between my fingers.
“Now look at her,” says Janyce. “She’s doing so great.”
“I just didn’t have any faith, I don’t think I know how to have faith,” I say. Janyce doesn’t engage this thought with me. I’m sure she isn’t in the mood for my philosophical pondering, not on such a warm fall day while we follow our dog leading the way.
When we arrived at our house late on Thursday evening, I immediately sat on the couch to finish the podcast we were listening to in the car on our drive. Dr. Russell Kennedy, MD was talking with Mel Robbins about stored trauma in the body coming from childhood. “What if the younger version of you is just needing some attention and reassurance,” he said.
This reminds me of what my son was talking about the other day, I think, when he was describing to me about a stacking up of worries. Could it just be the mind? Pushing the familiar childhood feelings away of being separate or unheard or invisible? As soon as the podcast was over, I called my son and asked him to listen to the entire episode and then to call me back so we could talk about it.
“I’m going out now for a walk around the neighborhood with my headphones. I’ll listen and call you back in an hour,” he said.
I read one of Lauren Groff’s short stories the other night. It was only a few pages long about a woman who practiced nightly escapes in her life as a mother to two little boys because she didn’t want to be a woman who yells. She walked the streets of her Florida town at night observing and thinking and leaving the bulk of the nighttime mothering (or fathering) to her husband. This story reminded me instantly of myself with my one-year-old youngest son on my hip, thrusting him over to my husband Jim as soon as he walked in the door at the end of the day just so I could take our only car and drive and drive and drive. Drive down dark streets with the windows open and the radio on loud.
I admitted to my son, when we finally did talk about the podcast, that I was a deeply unhappy young mother.
“I didn’t have the knowledge of how to be a good parent in those days like I do now,” I said. And maybe some of this separation that you felt then is still in your body now because of that?
“I don’t know, mom,” he said. “In some ways I felt more separate from dad. I just didn’t see things the same way that he and my brother did.”
We talked a while on the phone and I reminded him of the time when he was four years old and I was on the floor of his room with my head in the closet putting the toys away and distracted by my own spinning thoughts. He was telling me a story and trying to show me something he held in his hands.
“And I told you that it was great and I loved it, even though I didn’t take my head out of the closet to look at what you were showing me, not even once. Do you remember that?” I said.
“Well, I think I only remember from hearing you tell me about this event later,” he said.
“I will never forget the look of hurt and anger on your face when I finally picked my head up to look at you. I never even bothered to look at what you were showing me and I lied to you and you knew,” I said.
The three of us continue along silently in single file following the red arrows nailed to the trees, traversing the path as it wends its way down to one of the freshwater ponds that dot the wooded interiors of Chatham. There’s a quiet beauty found in places like this in October, without another human soul around. I don’t know if my son struggles with depression and anxiety today because of my poor parenting skills back then, but I do wonder about it. I think about it now to myself as we walk around the water, with the still trees reflected in the surface and only the chittering call of the kingfisher swooping down and darting away again at the top of the pines.