tamed

After a long weekend (half of Thursday, all of Friday and Monday off) Daniel goes back to work today, which means that I extra have to get out of bed this morning so the bedroom can once again become his office-slash-man-cave. So I'm going to punt a bit on writing and quote two Facebook posts from Glennon Doyle:

One:

Every great spiritual teacher tells us the same story about humanity and pain: Don't avoid it. You need it to evolve, to become. And you are here to become.
First the pain, then the waiting, then the rising.
All of our suffering comes when we try to get to our resurrection without allowing ourselves to be crucified first.
There is no glory except straight through your story.
I keep a note stuck to my bathroom mirror: Feel It All.
It reminds me that when the pain and the waiting are here, the rising is on its way. I hope the pain will pass soon, but I’ll wait it out because I’ve tested pain enough to trust it. And because who I will become tomorrow is so unforeseeable and specific that I’ll need every bit of today’s lessons to become her. It's my daily reminder to let myself burn to ashes and rise, new.
Happy Easter, friends. All things are new. Including you. 

Two:

“I burned the memo insisting that the way a family avoids brokenness is to keep its structure by any means necessary. I noticed families clinging to their original structures that seemed very broken, indeed. I noticed other families whose structures had evolved and were healthy and vibrant.
I decided that a family’s wholeness or brokenness has little to do with its structure. A broken family is a family in which any member must break herself into pieces to fit in. A whole family is any family -- regardless of structure -- in which each member can bring her full self to the table knowing that she will always be both held and free.” -UNTAMED
My Easter Wish is that we will create relationships, families, communities, and nations in which each and every one of our truest selves can be both Held and Free.

This shelter-in-place stuff seems to have a way of throwing us back to our most fundamental relationships, which means Daniel has been spending a lot of time lately writing to his mom and friends back home and I...have been trying to check the boxes with my parents without getting too close. I was talking to my lovely therapist about this and he keeps telling me that I have to accept how things are - that for whatever reason I can't have the relationship with my parents that I want to have, and that's just how it is, so checking the boxes is the best I can do. And while this has been a sentiment I desperately needed to hear in other areas of my life, here it doesn't resonate. Or sure, more likely I'm in denial, but still...it's not specific enough, somehow. What kind of relationship do I want to have with my parents? And what is it about them or me or both - fixable or not - that prevents this relationship from happening? It's all so foggy. But it has something to do with avoiding pain, something to do with clinging to structures that don't serve us, a lot to do with gender roles...probably time to read Glennon's book.