Empty Nesting Day 16: Most days there is a tsunami of emotion pulsing just under the surface and it takes all of my regulation skills to find a dose of equanimity. These five source of soul sustaining wisdom have become companions in this strenuous season of transition.
#1 Gail Honeyman’s book Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine: Told in the first person, this tender story of a trauma survivor battling agoraphobia, OCD and the voices of her cruel mother is inspiring and, in my clinical opinion, on point in mapping how we outgrow a small life constructed by woundedness and enter into a more spacious and honest way of moving through our relational world.
#2 Released in May, Thunderbolts, the latest film in the Marvel Cinematic Universe, is for anyone who has ever battled shame—which means it’s for ALL of us. Even for those not familiar with the characters, the wisdom, insight and vision of what it means for a group of people to communally battle shame on someone’s behalf reminds me why I’m a therapist.
#3 “Keep me from expecting more of myself than you expect of me.”
This one line from an opening prayer in Virginia Froehle’s guide Called Into Her Presence: Praying with Feminine Images of God, has helped me relax into the reality of not having the energy I expected in these weary weeks. Bekah Stewart, friend and author of Permission to Matter, turned me on to this gem that is becoming a lifeline in a season when being motherless is excruciating.
#4 I’m just 80 pages into Anthony Doerr’s novel All the Light We Cannot See, for which he won the Pulitzer in 2015, and I’m enamored! This short paragraph is anchoring me to the truth that the pain we are unaccustomed to does not control our lives.
“The despair doesn’t last. Marie-Laure is too young and her father is too patient. There are, he assures her, no such things as curses. There is luck, maybe, bad or good. A slight inclination of each day toward success or failure. But no curses.” (p. 28)
#5 In poignant chapters of life I often circle back to poetry. These closing lines from Mary Oliver’s poem Wild Geese help me imagine new ways of feeling connected to people even though I no longer belong to a school community.
“Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, hard and exciting,
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.”
