Yuletide Tidings

As I wobble out of bed this morning, I am reminded that today is the day I traditionally decorate my home for the Yuletide season. However, this year for the first time in about 12 years, I am "alternatively" employed at this time of year. My project for the last month has been to get my house in order, declutter and cleanse each and every area of my home. So, the thought of taking out all those decorations and "messing up" my clean house will have to be reassessed. There are still a few projects I am working on before I will be ready to make our home merry for the holidays. Thankfully, my lack of traditional employment allows for me to wait a day or two (or three) to haul out the holly.

In the meantime, I have made the very difficult decision to not enroll in the immersion midwifery programme coming up in January, strictly due to finances. I wrestled with this issue, but any opportunity, no matter how good, if offered at the wrong time, is really not an opportunity. In leaving my lucrative position at a major corporation, I committed myself to my family first. And with that, comes a whole mess of little responsibilities and errands and jobs that, were I to dedicate half my waking hours to my education at this time, would not allow me to give the focus and attention I need to give to my family. So in the end, perhaps my life's journey is a bit like my home's journey: I still have a few projects to finish up before I redecorate my mind and my passion with new decor.

May you all have blessed holidays!

Transition

This is the year of transition. At this time last year, I was preparing for events that would begin this transformation. I had a wedding to plan and participate in (as the bride!), my final year as a "band mom", my mother's transition to being somewhat local again after 10 years of living abroad, a father who is practicing semi-retirement, ... and the list goes on. What I didn't anticipate was the depth of my mourning for all things past and how necessary that is to complete this transition.

Don't get me wrong: All these transitions are good, necessary things. I am very happy in my new marriage, bursting with pride as my high-school graduate transitions to college freshman, am pleased to see BOTH of my children gainfully employed, and am deeply grateful that the recession has not affected our family financial outlook overmuch. However, it does seem that my soul is still trying to process all that we are leaving behind, and although I am seemly diligent in practicing living in the moment, I am awoken at night or stopped in my daily activities with overwhelming emotions as I am suddenly reminded of "moments" from the past.

In these moments, I am not so much processing the events: the memory of being an at home mother of a 15 month old and a 2 month old, trying to manage in a foreign country on $300 a month, a shared car, and an absentee-Army husband; the memory of eating breakfast on our patio outside as deer wander by and my 4 and 5 year old frolic in the field; the memory of the tense moment, sitting in the ER with my son and my ex-husband waiting for news of what was wrong with my son's brain and hoping my daughter was okay at home, alone. Those events do bring a sense of expected emotion with them. But what I am struck with at odd and seemingly-inappropriate times, are the full-force emotions of those past moments. I remember emotions I had forgotten I was dealing with at the time. It's a little like post-traumatic-stress-disorder, but not from one specific event. These episodes span the entirety of my adult life and recall to my consciousness not the actions, not the conversations, not even the descriptions of the feelings of the moment; I am overwhelmed with the full-force of the emotions I was feeling at the time that I was trying to manage in those moments. So rather than remember the apartment we lived in while staying in Germany, I become the feeling of loneliness and desperation of being a young mother in a foreign country. I am the panic I felt wondering what might happen if one of the kids was mortally injured and I couldn't contact their father - or worse - even get to a doctor because I was without a vehicle. Instead of remembering the song the kids were dancing to in our blissful 100 acre campground-cum-backyard, my soul is overwhelmed with that mother's protectiveness and pure love that I tried to contain in those moments where I saw Source sparkling from my children at play and in perfect harmony with the universe. When experienced like this - at random times, and in a time where I'm trying to find my new equilibrium - it can be quite distracting and leaves me once again, trying to find my new balance.

Some days are better than others. Some of these episodes last just a moment as I re-experience the emotions of that moment, acknowledge that from which I came and put it in perspective of where I am now, so I can set my course more clearly on where I would like to be headed. Some episodes take over my vision and perspective in such a way, it forces me to stop all my daily activities and just process, process, process, until I can begin to integrate these emotions, ideas, and soul memories back into the person I am now. It sometimes takes the form of different outward appearances - anger, illness, depression, confusion - but I am beginning to understand these moments are necessary to bring my soul into alignment with my current existence.

I am strong enough now to deal with these emotions that were too much for me to handle at the time. In order to move forward into this new existence that all this transition has pushed me towards, I have to process these emotions. By bringing all my separate bits of experience that were too much for me to deal with at the time into the current "me", I can live my life more fully and more completely. I can be a more complete "me".