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Volume 1
Issue 1
July 1998
Iris
Publishing
Front
Page
Feature
Article
Sleep
Stories
Other
Iris News
Creativity and Inner Work are intimate partners.
With the playfulness of a child as your primary tool you can by-pass many of your self-generated road-blocks. You can travel through the sometimes forbidding lands of intense emotions or adjusting to life events.
For one such life event I had managed to seclude myself at a friend's apartment on the Oregon coast and wrote.
Ungraceful Grieving
or
The Birth of my Reevaluation Sabbatical
by Sarah Richards
Looking Backward
There is a secret grief that I must hide from all my friends who have legitimate grief. Legitimate grief is when something bad happens, in my case something good happened. I was a good enough mother who had a generous dose of good fortune and my son grew into a responsible, intelligent, caring, and handsome person. He did well in school, so well that he was accepted to his first and only choice of colleges. In one week or so we'll drive him up and move his stuff into his first dorm room. So, what is so sad about that?
I'll tell you. It means he won't be living in my house anymore. It means the part of me that has been listening and attentive to him for his whole life will be listening to echoes. The times his friends would come over and there would be a teenage boy energy surge in the house is finished. My friends with older children tell me that the relationship changes, and that kids do return. But I know it won't be in that constant, everyday way.
My husband softly suggests why not take some time to relish my new freedom from that listening ear. He doesn't realize that my listening ear is so much a part of me that I don't know how to hear freedom from responsibility for another's life. My ex-husband learned long ago what it was like without his son around every day. Now it is my turn, and I'm not doing it gracefully.
My heart is aching and tears come to my eyes when I speak about it, no matter how obliquely. Perhaps this is like a little death, because to me he will be gone forever. There is that hollow emptiness looming in the part of the house that he occupied and on the couch where he would lie for hours and read. There won't be the brief moment of loud music when I get home and then seeing his body rushing over to turn it down, or off, or not, if he's feeling rebellious. Who will introduce me to new music? To old, classical writing that he spends days reading? Who will argue with me about obscure philosophical points about being grateful for getting gifts one hasn't asked for? Who will argue me into fantastic cultural experiences like seeing Les Miserables which he had insisted that we go since we were going to be so close to New York on the trip to New England to see family.
But the real problm, the one that I'm most ashamed of is that I don't know who I will be now that I don't have to be a Mom. I've been a fabulously liberal, laissez-faire kind of Mom except that I had a few things that I nagged about like room-cleaning. But for the most part, I'd taught what I could and then released him to live his own life with respect, integrity, and considerateness. It's worked. His friends and teachers all say he is very responsible and has such high integrity he can sometimes be a pain.
He certainly doesn't need me much at all any more. During his life I've led my own and had a couple of careers with some success in each. I didn't volunteer much as schools other than an occasional stint when the spirit moved me, and I think I only went to one parent's association meeting just after the state choked the flow of funds to the schools. To the outside world I wasn't the kind of mother than one would expect to have such a hard time with his departure.
I suppose letting go hasn't been the problem, the problem is not being needed anymore, in any tangible way that I can readily see. He doesn't want me to take him places, he has his own license and won't be here anyway. Even going on trips isn't fun right now, he doesn't want to go anywhere with me if he can go with his friends. I don't blame him. I suppose the yearning to be with parents doesn't kick in again until later, after one has exhausted the potentials in friends and realized there is still a niche in the heart that only parents can fill. Then he'll return and ask for company and I'll be happy to have him.
Looking Forward
My life is changing. I've been fired from mothering plus I gave up a 10 year career a few months ago and have been treading water since then. I no longer have an answer to the question "what do you do?" If I tell the truth, I get a blank stare and then a glancing around looking for someone else to draw into the conversation. The truth is that I've been promoted from momming and I'm taking some time to reevaluate the direction of my life, and what I'm doing with it. I call it a reevaluation sabbatical.
I've only just begun, but already it is bearing fruit by challenging me in some basic assumptions about life and what is important. Because I research sleep and insomnia problems I'm finding and odd thing - waking in the middle of the night isn't always awful! Since I've started this reevaluation sabbatical I've often woken up and been excited and happy to spend an hour or so awake, creating or planning something. Then catching another couple of hours of sleep before rising for the day.
The best thing about my reevaluation sabbatical is that I'm trying out the things that I said I wanted to do. I'm relaxed and getting plenty of exercise. My husband and I talk more and play more together. Now that my son has actually gone off to college and I've found it really isn't so bad, my grief has dimmed, but it still lives with me even so. I'm still a Mom, but I don't have to do momming anymore, and that's ok.
This is what you must be prepared for if you take a reevaluation sabbatical
- blank stares from people who ask what you do (if you tell the truth)
- coping with feelings of worthlessness as the world seems to be filling more and more with pain and despair and you're not helping relieve the suffering
- guilt that you can get up at will and putter around and then write if you want, or read, or go out with a friend
- fear, constant fear, about money supply and sources. Or, if you have guilt for having plenty of money it will shout at you
- bewilderment from your partner or spouse when they ask you to do something and you refuse - after all don't you have all the time in the world and shouldn't you be available to him/her?
- roller-coaster emotions
- a challenge to your deepest philosophies about life and what are important questions to yourself about whether you should be what appears to be retired? What the heck will you do when you are really retired? Whether this is the start of a life-long retirement habit and what does it mean, anyway?
