Close to the Root
The dog walked into the woods and back out again, a tangle of burrs in her matted fur. I have spent the last 2 nights gently holding the fur closest to the skin and plucking them out one by one with my thumb and forefinger. It is the pulling that hurts- when you hold close to the root, it lessens the sting.
“Mama, can we go to Paris?”
My oldest needs to see the world in the same way an introvert needs an empty room. She cannot breathe in this town- this tiny town we moved to when the world was still reeling from the apocalypse, our second-floor apartment much too small for her dreams of the stage and the Eiffel Tower. I hoped this centuries-old house (because I had stopped praying, then) would hold us as gently as the brook in the backyard. It has, and it hasn’t.
I don’t know anything about Chakras. Not really. Only enough to know every online quiz I’ve ever taken points to my root Chakra being broken. What do you do with that? When the foundation is cracked? When you hold close to the root, I think to myself, knuckles deep in black and white fur, it lessens the sting. One strong pull and the cracks will spider. Some walls are meant to come down.
My old over-production, eager to please, fill-in-the-cracks tendencies crept up so fast this season ,I didn’t see them coming. There’s no color, I tell my therapist. Where did the color go? I am being pulled out to sea with the tide. Christmas. Mortgage. Aging parents. Raising teenagers. Career. Marriage.
I can’t get the biggest and last burr out from the inside of her ear. She will eventually try to bite my fingers off- her unfriendly warning snarls are coming too frequently. She loves me, but not enough to not cause bodily harm. She is a dog, and this is who she is.
I am navigating the line of parenting young adult-ish people poorly. I do not know when to back off and when to step in. When to rescue and when to allow resilience to grow. When to bail out, when to stand aside. I want to hold as closely to the skin as they’ll let me, to lessen the sting. But they are meant to pull away.
I can’t stop the pulling. I will have to find another way.
Perhaps it lies close to the root.
I’ll let you know when I find it.
Of all the stages of parenting, raising young adult-ish people is the hardest. One day, they pull away, and the next, they want you close. It's a dance where the music never really stops. But the steps become smoother and more fluid until you can no longer tell who is leading and who is following. And it doesn't matter. The important thing is that you keep dancing.
We are the substrate to which their roots are anchored. It feels unnatural when they start to pull, like they (or we) will suffer.
But—as the adage goes—they get wings, too. And we have to help that process by letting go little by little so they can strengthen enough to fly.
But man, does it feel like death some days…