It All Blew Up

When I was in college, I used to drive I-70 to my parents' house for breaks. I'd start out early in the morning, before dawn, driving across the variegated sameness of Indiana and western Ohio, before winding through the hills that would become the mountains of West Virginia and western Pennsylvania.

For 12 hours it was just me, a few snacks, the long highway and a pile of tapes to which I could sing out loudly and strong. It was long before cell phones, and for those 12 hours, I was just the girl in the Beetle, the one the cops never thought could possibly go as fast as their radars indicated, reveling in speed and solitude.

And somewhere in the middle of the day, I would, without fail, suddenly find the highway kiting off to the left without warning and there I'd be, braking hard and searching street signs as I was summarily dumped onto the streets of downtown Columbus.

That's how my life feels right now: like the highway suddenly sprung up a left-exit-only lane I didn't know about and now I'm on an entirely different road, speeding to some destination I can't even see.

In the last few weeks, our whole lives have been turned upside down, and through nothing more crisis-laden than our own hearts. First, Ms. P's mom suggested she think about finishing school full time, and we started actually considering it instead of assuming we're too broke and financially inept to manage it. Then Ms. P started really dreaming about seminary as a possibility after she finishes her BA, and that dreaming took the shape of reading websites and researching UU seminaries, and it became all too real, in the best sense of that term. Then her job (naturally) got intolerable, and when she found a 30-hour-a-week job in a church we like, she applied. And then she applied to some others. And then she gave her notice.

And then we talked about adoption and how it fits in. And first we decided it would have to wait, and then I freaked out and we decided we'd get into the pool and see what happened, and then I continued to freak out, and we did some deep talking and discerning, and it seems really clear to us that, whatever we on the surface want, adoption is not where we're being led right now.

You can imagine what happened next: deep, deep grief. My life has been, in one way or another, pointed towards children since before I can properly remember. Letting go of that -- or even contemplating letting go of that -- basically meant hysterical crying. For hours. Set to a hair-trigger. It was a charming couple of days.

But here's what else happened: I felt like my whole life got blown up. All of a sudden, my future, my sense of my self, they were all replaced with this undistinguished greyness. I had no idea what I was called to do or be outside of parenting -- and I realized how much I was putting my life on hold, thinking my "real" life would start once I got to parent. And whatever else is true, I don't want to live like that.

And so, this weekend, Ms. P and I settled in with some discernment tools and started trying to articulate what we ARE called to, what we're being invited into. It's still tentative, still nascent, still emerging. But it's exciting.

And it's nothing like we thought it would be a month or two back.

This is how things happen with us -- all of a sudden. We're slow, we plod, and then, in a matter of weeks, we throw everything up in the air and come back down into something new.

There is still grief. There is still sadness for the future we thought we'd have that isn't manifesting. My sister giving birth to her twins yesterday was just the icing on that particular cake.

But despite the grieving, despite the sadness, despite the loss, there's something that feels right about this as well. There's no going back, no turning back the clock to regain an option that has been so important to us. And there's an excitement as well, a quiet thrumming that suggests we're on the right path to something, even if we don't quite know what that is yet.

Comments

[dale]

Oh, that's hard. You get used to leaning on the future.

xoxoxo

Lots of love

[Thorn]

I'm glad you know what path you shouldn't be going down, since that's going to be the best way to get you where you need to be instead. Good luck on your discernment. I'm just glad you were interested in adoption long enough for me to find your blog!

And what's up with Columbus? I generally drive through it on North-South roads, but exactly the same thing happens there, so I do know exactly what you're talking about with your comparison. My college, too was, off I-70, and I don't miss that flat flat land.

[frog]

Honey, you are SO in my prayers. You know this.