Lost and Found

Dichotomies. There can be no gain without loss, no found without lost, no happy without sad. This past week I was more in tune with loss and sadness than I have been in a while. Perhaps that is what comes with autumn. This is a time of falling back, the springing forth is in the past--and in the future. The seasons of nature are tied with the seasons of my soul. Spring and fall are visual and emotional onomatopoeia. And round and round the seasons go in an endless cycle.

It feels like loss when the trees lose their leaves and the perennials go underground. Just as it feels like loss when I plant something that doesn't thrive. In fact, more does not thrive than does. May Sarton, wrote: “A garden is always a set of losses set against a few triumphs, like life itself.” There has been much loss in my life: lovers, friends, my sense of what "family" should look like, jobs, home, family members. And, of course, there has been much gain--more than a few triumphs--sometimes as a direct result of the loss. Without the losses I would not be who I am; my life would not contain much of what I love about it.

As I watch my niece marry her love this weekend and hear their promise to love each other and take care of each other through thick and thin until death, I feel the sadness of that heartfelt vow in light of the fact that sometimes it just isn't possible--and you have no idea. I meant it when I said it to her uncle. I thought that was what would be. When, nearly 20 years later, I came to know myself as a lesbian, I knew I had to break that vow in order to be true to myself. It was a terrible choice, one fraught with loss and pain. Stay true my vow or true to myself? Last night, as Lori's parents shared a private dance in celebration of their 28th anniversary, were joined by Lori and Shawn just beginning their marital life, and then by their older daughter and her husband of five months, I began to weep. I wept for the beauty of their traditional family as I sat at a table with my children and their father and stepmother. We will share no moments like that. I hoped it would be different. I hoped we would be an enlarged family, rather than a fractured family. But, although we are an amiable group--evidenced by the fact that I am here this weekend--we are not what I had imagined. We are me and them. It is a loss.

I have a wonderful son, and he has a lovely family. And I feel like I failed him. I know deep inside in a place he may not have been able to access, he felt abandoned--and adolescence is a terrible time to feel that you have lost your mother; whether or not it was true. It was an additional confusion in a developmentally confusing time. And I felt like he left me. How much was the typical path of an adolescent male and how much was my coming out and leaving his father, is not mine to know. But it still feels like something lost. I hope that who he is now, at 31, is in some part a testament to who he has known me to be, both before and after his picture of family shattered. I have faith that it is so; and that the found is greater than the lost for him.

And what have I found? I love my life. I love making decisions just for myself, from what to have for dinner to what to create in the garden to where to go on vacation to what is next in my life. I have found strength buried in myself. I am happy. So much of what is and has been my life the past decade and a half would not have been, if I had chosen to lose myself in order to hang onto the traditional family. I have not spent the last 16 years forcing myself into a life that didn't fit. I watch my daughter, in her long, strapless dress and her hair styled into the mohawk that fits who she is, precede her cousin down the aisle; and I rejoice that she generally doesn't have to squeeze the mohawk life into the long black dress life. After college, she spent two years in the Peace Corps in a remote African village, then moved across America to begin her next adventure. She has transitioned with ease from who she thought she was in the 4th grade when I came out, to who she knows herself to be today at 26. Did I pave that path of ease and comfort for her? I can't know what it would have been like for her without my journey; but I do know, whether or not I felt it or she recognized it, I modeled courage and integrity to her. I looked fear in the face and honored my self.

I have made big changes more than once. And I have been afraid each time. And each time I have found new kinds of fulfillment and happiness. When I was a child, my mother sang me the lullaby, Hush Little Baby. And I sang it to my children (though I changed the language to be more inclusive, just as I have changed the language for God, because I don’t believe God to be exclusively male, or female). The song is a promise that when one thing doesn’t work out, another opportunity will come along, and someone will be there to help us on the journey. Kate Maloy (A Stone Bridge North) writes "...a series of changes through my life were like freight cars, the first carrying cargoes of pain and anxiety, the next ones bearing excitement, adventure, delight, and thanksgiving--but all of them, I have learned, rumbling on a solid track.” Faith is the solid track. It is not unwavering confidence. Faith is knowing and not knowing. Fear and strength. Doubt and acceptance. Confusion and clarity. And round and round. The strength of faith is the repeated cycles, in life and in nature. For faith to work, you have to give it room to move around. If we don't step out on faith, we have no need of it.

My roving friend, Charly, grieved for so long the loss of her picture of what she thought would be and fought so hard the idea that she could be happy without a replacement life that looked as similar as possible to that picture. Now, in a gradual instant, she is living--truly living--into what is. She does it scared; she has been doing it scared for the past several years. She pushes through her fear of change, her sadness of all that has been lost, carrying it all with her even as she moves on into exciting new ventures. She is beginning to understand that what she has found is at least as important to her as what she has lost. She is one of my heroes.

Faith is hacking away my plants for winter in the belief that spring will come again and grow them back. There is no indication right now that this will happen, only history. I also know that the garden in the spring won’t look just like the one that is disappearing now. The hosta at the foot of the stairs might not be as glorious, but the banana tree might actually grow to the rooftop.  When I start disaster-izing--thinking I will not survive some sadness or event or decision--I remember what a therapist once said to me: Where is the evidence that the bad result you imagine will actually happen? Think back to similar situations and outcomes. Did you curl up and die from it? Or did it make you stronger? Was your life shit forever after? Or did you live into what was gained and rejoice in a life that was different from what you expected? It happens in a gradual instant. Both Charly and I grieved our losses for a a long time; then suddenly, it seemed, the grief eased. And we will grieve again. Those old losses will always bring remembered sadness for they are part of our being. And we will push through again, more quickly each time, because we always have.

I pull more of the vinca and impatiens this week and plant more pansies and violas; but I am still holding on to some of the summer plants, not quite ready to pull them all. I find myself thinking again of what might be next in my life. What am I holding onto? What is ready to pull up? What am I getting ready to plant? I already know that next spring I will replace the front shrubs I have dug up with roses; I am ready to try something new in the garden. In the past few weeks I have felt a strengthening stirring for the next big thing in my life, too. I am learning to have faith that I will recognize the right time, rather than manufacture and insist on just the right conditions. And when the time comes, there will be more lost and more found. I know it will be so, because it always has been.

I look out our hotel window this weekend at the St. Louis Gateway Arch. It is the symbol of expansion, exploration, and growth. It was built with faith that the two parts would meet at the top, and that the two legs would not topple before the keystone could be put in and hold it together. I hope to never stop expanding my horizons and looking for new directions in which to grow. I want to have faith that all the parts of who I have been, who I am now, and who I will be will come together and form a whole life; and that the lost will always be balanced by the found.