Firing Up The Flux Capacitor
There is something about 80’s movies that brings me so much peace- and thankfully my dear husband is the same, which I think is a good indicator that we are getting old. Anyway, there are so many we love, and not long ago we found ourselves introducing our kids to “Back to the Future” starring my husband’s 80’s idol, Michael J. Fox. If you haven’t seen it, the basic premise of the movie is Marty McFly successfully uses inventor Doc Brown’s time-traveling DeLorean car to travel from 1985 to 1950 and back, by way of an amazing invention called the “flux capacitor.” Miscellaneous adventures ensue throughout the course of the movie, and like most 80’s movies, it follows the basic Freytag Pyramid of Dramatic Structure: Exposition, Rising Action, Climax, Falling Action, and Denouement. Maybe that’s what we like so much about 80’s movies: they are simple, predictable, and easy to watch. :)
So back to the flux capacitor: I’m telling you, if the show “Shark Tank” had existed and someone was willing to market that item, my first car could have used a flux capacitor a time or two…. Particularly to resolves issues of my then-chronic lateness. Or perhaps to skip ahead through something super boring, like for example, the mind-numbing days spent watching old ladies try on wool gabardine elastic-waisted pants in the early nineties at the Stanford Nordstrom where I worked during the summers between college semesters. Or maybe I could have even avoided unsavory and bizarre car issues, like the one I had on one otherwise normal 20-minute commute from Mountain View to Palo Alto in my 1986 Chevy Cavalier station wagon named “The Cream Dream”-a vehicle of which I’ve spoken many times.
There are a couple places along the 280 North freeway to San Francisco where the grade is slightly inclined. I was simply rolling along minding my own business when I eventually noticed there was something weird going on with the Cream Dream’s accelerator, as it was becoming increasingly difficult to depress with my foot. It wasn’t necessarily totally out of character for something strange happen to my vehicle (as plenty of stories will attest) but this was somewhat concerning. So much so that I actually had to move over to the far-right freeway lane because I was literally slamming on the pedal, wondering what the heck was going on. Finally, I made it to my exit on Sand Hill Road and pulled into the Sharon Heights Safeway parking lot. I exited the car, stepped into the sunshine, and bent down to investigate the accelerator mystery. Now I don’t consider myself any kind of mechanic, but as doc Brown would say, “Great Scott!” It didn’t take a genius to figure out there was clearly something inhibiting the ability to drive this vehicle properly.
I reached down and to my surprise and utter bewilderment, I dislodged a granny smith apple from the back of my accelerator that had apparently become wedged between the pedal and the floorboard. Scratching my head, I played Nancy Drew for a second and finally remembered that I had hastily thrown together some snacks and tossed them into a Mervyn’s bag that morning. Running a few minutes behind (of course), I had shoved the bag and my purse on the passenger seat of the Cream Dream and blazed down the street in a 4-cylinder cloud of Estee Lauder perfume and perm-protectant hairspray. Somehow, the apple must have rolled out of the bag and onto the floor during the course of the drive. As if it were a homing pigeon, the apple ended up finding its’ way like a pinball in an arcade game into its chosen sweet spot: under the pedal. Chunks of apple and spots of juice blanketed the floor mat. I shook my head, totally dumbfounded and scrambling to prepare a speech to give to the Nordstrom floor manager as to why I was late. Somehow, “there was an apple under my accelerator” sounded about as plausible as “the dog ate my homework.”
The Past
Similarly, there have been many times in my life when there’s been a proverbial “apple” (sometimes without my choosing, and many times self-imposed) making forward progress in my life extremely difficult. Like for example when I had my 4th baby and sort of all out refused to consider that I might have postpartum depression until it beat me down. It started with my failure to realize that I had 4 kids in the same timespan that most of my friends had 2. Of course, we were all foraging through this “mom of young kids” thing together, but instead of giving myself double the grace (since I had double the amount of kids), I spent a great amount of useless energy I really couldn’t afford to lose being frustrated and forever disappointed in myself. I would beat myself up for not being able to keep up the seemingly polished pace of those mothers who had a couple of kids spaced several years apart. I was desperately jealous of those who had family living nearby who could and would pop over and grab a colicky baby on a moments’ notice. I was on this endless track of constantly comparing my insides to my perception of everyone else’s outsides.
Mothering young kids with no daily help (except for when my mom would come up from CA occasionally to visit and help me for a week) had taken it’s toll on me physically, emotionally, and mentally by the time I had that 4th baby. I had been pregnant or nursing a baby plus taking care of young children for the greater part of 6 years. Eventually, I had no idea who I was anymore. I felt like a rudderless ship with no purpose, no clear course. Every costume I tried on didn’t seem to fit: I wasn’t the “Type-A” mom, with a meticulous schedule and routine. I wasn’t the “Helicopter Mom” who ran around her kids doing everything for them from tying their shoes to wiping their behinds (when they were WAY too old for that) and intervening with playground dramas. I wasn’t the “Jedi Mom” who was a master planner (12 months out, minimum) of all things social and extracurricular for her kids. And I certainly wasn’t the “Martha Stewart Mom” who made all the lunches from scratch and placed them in home-sewn lunch bags containing handwritten calligraphy notes featuring Dickinson quotes…..The free-range chicken sandwich with alfalfa sprouts would be found effortlessly resting on a bed of recycled raffia, wrapped in organic cellophane shrink wrap with an organza bow.
No, I was more like the Don Knotts “Barney Fife” mom, from the Andy Griffith Show. (You might have to YouTube it, young people.) Try as I might to be organized and stay a step ahead of the game, I found myself just kind of “winging it” through every missed registration deadline, every late appointment, every form filled out that was missing half the details, every tantrum in the grocery store as a result of a missed nap, every wrong kid dropped off at party on the wrong day or at the wrong time. That form of identity was depressing. I felt totally incapable, completely out of my league amongst these other moms who seemingly had their shit together. I looked at the minutiae of my life and realized how pathetic it seemed- going to the dentist by myself was almost as exciting as I imagined it would be to have Ed McMahon rolling up to my suburban doorstep in the Publisher’s Clearing House “Prize Patrol” Van with a check for 10 million dollars and a bouquet of balloons.
My resentments grew larger and more frequent: it was if they were all thrown into a pot and stirred together, creating one giant pot of “Frustration Soup” comprised of my kids, my husband, and myself. I mentally beat myself up wondering why I did not find this life fulfilling. Other mom friends I knew who had to work were jealous that I got to stay home. I was jealous that they got to go to work. I grew tired of pretending I was happy and fulfilled when the reality was most days I found myself stuck in a shame spiral. Some days I just wanted to walk out of my house, lock the door behind me and never look back. Other days I wanted to run down the street screaming, just to see if it would make me feel better. Still other days I longed for what seemed to be the “impossible dream”: I just wanted to sit in the quietness of my house, for one hour, with no one else in it except for me and let the stillness wash over me to see if that would make a difference.
The cloud around me became even more stifling when I reflected on my former teaching days in my early married years when we still lived in California. I had been so passionate and engaged in writing, presenting lectures and connecting with students. As I cleaned up another pile of spilled Cheerios off the floor or wiped another nose, I secretly longed to have those teaching days back, thinking that maybe I shouldn’t have quit and moved to Seattle. Suddenly, I would be nearly overcome with self-disgust over having those thoughts as I remembered how many people I personally knew who had trouble conceiving and tried to force myself mentally to try to be appreciative.
In the sleepless nights, I would ruminate and relive my early life which was so engrossed in the church. I participated in many high school and college mission trips where I had seen firsthand how those in true poverty lived. I flashed back to the beautiful memory of these people’s effortless joyful toothless smiles, despite their deplorable surroundings and the fact that they had no idea where their next meal was coming from. The homes I helped build were really nothing more than 4 makeshift walls, a door and a roof, and yet those humble homes were legitimately thrilling for its’ sweet inhabitants. And there I lay, in a warm bed, in a brand new 4,000 square foot house, not having to get up and go work in the fields doing manual labor for an obscenely low monetary compensation just to put a bowl of something, anything, on the table for my children. My healthy kids laid in their beds, my husband sleeping beside me preparing for another day in the corporate world where he was favored, respected and needed. Restless with despair and self-hatred, I would toss and turn and eventually start sobbing in the dead of night where no one could see the depths of my private misery.
In hopes of “fixing” myself, I tried acupuncture. I tried obsessively working out. I tried eating. I tried not eating. I tried drinking out in the cul-de-sac with my neighbors, every afternoon and well into the evening. I tried increasing my prayers and church participation. I just didn’t want to feel those shitty feelings anymore. It was if I were chained to these constant, all-encompassing emotions. Nothing worked. The depth of my despair swirled around me like the heavy, unrelenting, stifling San Francisco Bay fog. I felt like my feet were in encased in cement bricks and not even a jackhammer could crack this powerful hold on me. Even my friends were noticing I was like a ghost of a person- a morose vapor that surrounded a body where a real human used to be. Eventually it was obvious this condition was much bigger than I could handle on my own, and I needed professional help.
The Shift
Finally, I dragged myself to the phsychiatrist. I was at rock bottom, in need of a serious breakthrough. Like Doc Brown falling off the toilet and hitting his head in “Back to the Future”, when I was told I had postpartum depression, it was like the lights suddenly came on and life began to make the smallest bit of sense again. Because I had refused to speak up and ask for help before this point, my untreated PPD was the apple under the accelerator of my mental health and I couldn’t hide it or deny it any longer. One step at a time, I began to walk through the mire and do the hard therapy. After I was on the right combination of medication for awhile, I saw dramatic changes. I relinquished the self-imposed chore of constantly being hard on myself. I began to learn self-forgiveness and how to give myself grace. I could now laugh at myself and my complicated life. I began to see all the positives of being a “Barney Fife” mom…. How it actually forced me to come up with quick resolutions to problems, how to be flexible, how to come up with spur-of-the-moment (albeit crazy) innovations like Doc Brown in order to survive some situations like not having a diaper with me for the baby’s epic blowout or having a child literally get stuck in a seatbelt (just by screwing around- not due to a car accident) to the point where they had to be cut out by the fire department.
It became obvious that I needed to move past the less powerful plutonium energy source from “Back to the Future”: 1 pellet per trip in the Delorean was used to create the nuclear energy needed for temporal displacement in the time machine. Well, I needed something stronger than a pellet here and there to harness a power greater than myself…. And it could not be found in the form of a plutonium unit…. Or religious dogma, or desparately trying to prove my identity as a mother or a wife. What I really needed in order to hit that next level of my journey was that bolt of lightning to reach 1.21 gigwats and fuel my personal flux capacitor. We never know when or where that lightning may strike. For me it didn’t happen in an instant, it was more (and remains to be) a process. I was at the last house on the block, and I needed a complete renovation, which takes time to build- despite how it looks on HGTV.
The lightning bolt for me was a makeover of my spiritual life, coupled with fresh coping mechanisms. Time to purge all those old rusty tools like drinking, religious arrogance, and self-propulsion that didn’t serve me well in order to make room for new tools that did. “New friends and new playgrounds”, as the saying goes. I opened my mind to new methods of therapy, self-help and self-healing, and a healthy spirituality that didn’t require anything of me besides open-mindedness. As a result, my confidence returned in a fresh way. I also joined a self-help group where I have met men and women who showed me how to practice unconditional love for myself and the demonstrated the generosity to impact lives for free. (Those folks are some of my very best friends today, and those of you who have been there know what I’m saying- when you’ve all traveled to your own private hell and back and lived to tell about it, you’re instantly bonded at a level of honesty and connection like no other.) I realized a new identity was taking shape, and it wasn’t based on any achievements or lack of achievements; it was based on a new flower that grew out of the new soil of my practices of self-care and self-acceptance.
Present
In the early days of my recovery, I’d think back to those 5 years where I was severely depressed and never reached out for help. I’ll think of those wasted days of living in a fog, and I’ll want them back so I could make different choices. I wanted to fire up the flux capacitor to turn back time and do it differently. Reach out for that life preserver sooner. But you know what? Now I wouldn’t change a single thing. I’ve seen how every step was necessary; every stitch essential into making the quilt of my story what it is.
It sounds cliché but here’s my truth: today, I have no regrets- and I mean that wholeheartedly. I know with every cell in my body that my journey had to unfold the way it did. No wait: it’s not that it had to be that way, I can use the flux capacitor to go back in time and see that in hindsight, I had the honor of being a participant in that painful time period. Truly. Not one step of that treacherous walk wasn’t necessary to bring me to where I am today; mostly fulfilled, generally just accepting of myself, and in pursuit of a cyclical manner of living and learning, as opposed to a linear one that ends in the non-existent illusion of “perfection.”. No longer feeling the need to define myself by my perceived failures or successes. Knowing that I have nothing to prove to anyone, and that what other people think of me is none of my business. This is what freedom feels like and I’m simply obsessed with it. :) In a way, I think I now I at least partially understand how those brothers and sisters we served on mission trips may have felt: despite my circumstances, the “attitude of gratitude” has become the most precious and treasured tool in my toolkit.
Lastly, I’ve learned to have the courage to screw up, and the courage to change. I’ve had to learn to punt in so many other situations, it’s only natural that I’d learn to punt as my mothering career continues. I went from trying to do it all myself to realizing I can essentially do nothing by myself. If I hadn’t made that switch, out of the gift of desperation, I’m not sure where I’d be today- but I certainly wouldn’t be capable of valuing and prioritizing quality time with my kids and my husband the way I do today.
Future
I first learned to drive a car with a manual transmission in college. After terrorizing the streets of LA for a couple hours, I realized that if I didn’t shift when necessary, the car would redline and I’d have a bunch of problems to deal with. Similar experience when I’ve been in the flight simulator at Flight Ops for the airline my husband works for. The inexperienced pilot such as myself has to pay extremely close attention to what’s going on, otherwise pretty soon a firm voice is urgently booms through the cockpit instructing, “Pull Up! Pull Up!” I can assure you there isn’t much time to correct oneself once you hear that warning. On a personal level, I had to make a mental shift when I saw 2 lines on a pregnancy test after we were done having kids and discovered a fifth baby was on the way. Even with Marty McFly in the DeLorean, he needed to make adjustments as he drove it into the future.
Currently, I’m standing at the end of my pregnancy and birthing chapter. Being pregnant and having babies is not a lifetime career, it’s generally a small window of a woman’s life in the grand scheme of things. It’s almost weird to type this, since I was “so done” having kids after my 4th, and then my entire perspective changed after my 5th arrived. So now as I approach the end of the childbearing season of my life, I do wonder how it will feel after I’ve delivered my last baby, nursed her for the final time, watched her little newborn body change into a full-fledged baby, and then a toddler. I can’t predict the future, but I imagine I’ll have some significant emotions around it. Either way, it doesn’t matter because it will happen, and I will face it and walk through it. I’m no longer afraid to ask for help: I’m far more afraid when I don’t ask for help. The circumstances that scare me most are usually my greatest teachers.
The next season will roll around, and when it does, it will be time to cooperate with God and make that shift. Much like a baby taking first steps, it might be awkward and uncomfortable to a degree at first. After all, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t in Michael J Fox’s grand life plan to spend the rest of his days with Parkinson’s’ Disease, but I’ll bet he’s learned a few chunks of life wisdom from it. Like any ailment, life-alerting change or season of life, I know I will learn how to maneuver through it when the time comes. A couple years ago my 2 year old daughter broke her leg, and at first she was pretty much confined to the stroller. Soon, she was scooting around on her bum, dragging that heavy cast around. Not long after that, she was bouncing around on the heel of that cast like a professional. The human spirit is very resilient, and like Doc Brown and Marty McFly, a willingness to adjust my plan based on the conditions. Acceptance of that diversion is where the learning and the gratitude come from, and the result of those efforts is usually where I find my joy.