Category: Time

Stitching

On By Mary LennoxIn Anger, Conflict, Grief, Loss, Therapy, TimeLeave a comment

(or How Do You Mend a Broken Heart?)

Whenever I need to engage in some emotional self-flagellation, I know exactly where to go.  The ex-therapist still maintains a very active Twitter feed, and if I am stupid enough to look, I am bound to find something there that upsets me and makes me feel bad about myself.  I had stopped lurking altogether, for a time, but as the seasons started to shift and the cooler weather finally arrived, my psyche felt pulled back, still trying to reconcile the events of the past year.  A year ago she first told me she was sick.  In a few more weeks, it will be a year since our last session.  And in a few more weeks after that, it will be a year since she dumped me.  I can still feel it all deep in my bones: the fear, the disruption, the panic.

The ex-therapist has tweeted ad nauseam about how clients have “agency” and don’t have to read or follow any of her postings online.  I find this defense to be ignorant at best, and grandiosely self-justifying in reality.  She probably knows that she should be more careful with her tweets and words, knowing that there are clients and ex-clients out there, but she just can’t help herself.  So she constructs this elaborate justification for her actions, to make it all seem reasonable and okay.  The problem with this outlook is that the relationship between therapist and client can be intimate and intense in a way that is unlike any other relationship.  It’s also imbalanced, with the therapist usually knowing more about the client than vice versa.  So it is only natural that the client will seek out any information available to try to make sense of the person on the other side of the couch.  And the ex-therapist made that information so tantalizingly available, like leading a kid into a candy store.  It is irrational to then expect the kid to not indulge in the candy laid out before them.

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On the Run

On By Mary LennoxIn Grief, Loss, Motherhood, Running, Time, YogaLeave a comment

(or Left, Right, Left, Right…)

Once upon a time, I fancied myself to be a runner.  Before I had kids, I used to run regularly and it was my exercise of choice.  I preferred running outside, but probably did most of my runs on a treadmill at the gym at work because it was convenient and appealed to my statistics-oriented brain.  I could monitor and track time, distance, speed, calories, all right on the treadmill console.  I kept a running log in a spreadsheet (of course!), charting my progress to run longer and faster and tracking when it was time to buy new running shoes.

I really started running seriously when we lost the baby.  I poured most of my grief onto the treadmill as running felt like something I could actually control.  I could control the speed of the treadmill or how far I wanted to run each day.  I got lost in tracking the numbers and statistics and could therefore avoid dealing with the overwhelming grief I experienced inside but wasn’t able to process.  I loved getting lost in my own head for a while, far away from the torturous real-world.

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This Ashram Life

On By Mary LennoxIn Time, YogaLeave a comment

(or What Do You Mean There’s No Coffee?)

Sometimes I think that it might be nice to live in a convent.  I find the idea of always knowing that you have shelter, food, a job and a purpose in life to be quite comforting.  Never mind all the many sacrifices required: I’d nearly trade marriage and motherhood and free-will for a life where I didn’t have to worry about bills and career and retirement.  I said nearly.  Plus I’m not religious, much less Catholic.

This weekend I got a 48-hour insight into what a monastery life might look like.  In search of a break from the unrelenting demands of motherhood and an intense need to reconnect with the outdoors, my own breath and spirit, I headed to a yoga retreat at a nearby ashram.

I’d never been to an ashram before, and I probably should have done more research first (although to be fair, the website could have included a bit more information about exactly what I had just signed up for).  The specifics of the retreat really didn’t matter to me; I just wanted a time-out for a few days and the promise of hiking and yoga was enough for me to commit.

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unFramed

On By Mary LennoxIn Anger, Finding a Voice, Loss, Shame, Therapy, TimeLeave a comment

(or 2,700 seconds)

The therapeutic frame.  That pillar of the therapeutic relationship draconically enforced by authoritarian therapists and equally loathed by clients everywhere.  Or so I thought.

Shrinky term:

frame (noun, frām) – the setting of boundaries or ground rules for the contractual aspects of therapy. [1]The therapeutic frame governs the rules and expectations of therapy: time, place, fee, confidentiality, contact.  It is a crucial element for the creation of safety, for both client and therapist.

I spent 4 years in therapy where the frame was decidedly gray.  I’ve spent much of the last 9 months having to re-learn how to be in a healthy, boundaried therapeutic relationship.  All that time, before, I thought I was fighting against boundaries.  Now I see that I was actually reacting to a distinct lack of boundaries.  Just as children do better with well-defined boundaries and expectations, so do therapy clients.

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You Are Not Alone

On By Mary LennoxIn Loss, Love, Time, YogaLeave a comment

(or This One Time, At Summer Camp…)

Twice a week, just after lunch, you can usually find me downstairs in the fitness center where I work, suiting up for yoga class.  We are very lucky that we have two wonderful yoga teachers, exceptional in their own right and not just by traveling corporate yoga teacher standards.  We have not had nearly such good luck with the substitutes, though.  There was the one who didn’t know the class was only 45 minutes, and had to bring everything to an abrupt end when the angry meditators assembled outside the door, impatiently waiting to be let into the room.  There was the one who simply ended the class without shavasana.  For those of you who are not yogis, this is practically sacrilege.  Many of us spend 40 (or more) minutes in practice twisting our bodies into strange poses and awkward forms just to get to those blissful 5 minutes of corpse pose that is promised at the end.  There was the one who was so overly obsessed with proper form I have sworn to turn around leave the class if she ever subs again, such was my irritation level at the end of the last class she taught.

And then there was the one who brought along a playlist unlike any other I have ever encountered in a yoga class.  It was bold and loud and so completely out of sync with what I need to practice yoga.  And then, about halfway through the class, a familiar tune rose up:

Another day has gone
I’m still all alone
How could this be
You’re not here with me
You never said goodbye
Someone tell me why
Did you have to go
And leave my world so cold

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Left Behind

On By Mary LennoxIn Grief, Loss, Love, Therapy, Time2 Comments

(with Unfinished Business)

It’s been 15 days (and counting) since I last saw my therapist.  The last time I saw her I was still functioning under the illusion that she and her doctors were working, slowly, methodically, through a long diagnostic process.  Initial signs, along with a family history, pointed to MS, but in order to diagnose, they had to work down the MS rule out list.  There was a long list of possibilities to test for and that would take time to get through.  I did not sense any urgency.  It seemed sensible to remain calm and carry on with these rule-out tests.  Cancer was in the mix, and mentioned, along with the caveat that it seemed unlikely.  At one point, less than a month ago, there was even talk of just needing back surgery, with a mere 10 days to recuperate.

So I wasn’t worried.  And I wasn’t prepared when the very next day, the cancer diagnosis was made.  I had no time to prepare.  I didn’t know we’d be heading into a long, traumatic break.  When she took a 3-week break last spring, we had time to prepare and plan and find ways to explicitly stay connected.  This time, the bottom just fell out.

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The Missing Piece

On By Mary LennoxIn Complicated Grief, Grief, Loss, Love, Motherhood, TimeLeave a comment

(or Simple Questions, Complicated Answers)

People can ask the darnedest questions.  I can’t tell you the number of times we’ve been asked “Are you going to have a third?” or “Do you want to try for a daughter?”  Usually this comes in the form of idle small-talk and meaningless banter.  I have to hope that the questioners are just naive, and that they haven’t given much thought to the myriad of ways one could answer these seemingly innocent questions.

No matter how often it happens, it always takes my breath away, even for just a minute.  My heart wrenches, a sadness overwhelms me.  I might pause for a minute to think about how to respond – or how I would like to respond.  I usually defer to simple answers: “oh, I think we’re done” or maybe even “you never know.”

Truth is we already have a third child, a daughter.  She was our first and had to leave this human realm before we even had a chance to hold her.  She wouldn’t have survived here on earth, but I have to think she is somewhere, without pain, in the great beyond.

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