lucy wightman

It is time to come back here. Without question, I have had repetitive, nagging thoughts about the blog. All summer until now. What will I say? How will I describe the excuses and make the dead blog syndrome ancient history? What if I am lonely in blogland? What if everyone is mad or bored? What if the blogs people have cheated on this blog with are better? What do I want a blog for anyway?

These questions were bolstered by the pragmatics that conveniently developed. Torri’s little G4 is so old that it cannot update the browsers anymore so I can’t get into the blog to make entries with it. I changed internet providers and I do not understand Gmail’s format. The summer sun blazed through every window making it impossible to see the computer screen. Winkle needs reading glasses. Lucy wears contacts more and there isn’t a magnifier heavy or thick enough to see. My hands get tingly in the morning. The presidential election. My fingers crack in the fall and winter. Static electricity.

Golf.

Man changes.

How ridiculous! Home Guard 200, the humiliation of being wrongly charged, tried, and convicted, paralyzing, searing periods of sustained pain, unemployment, purposelessness, the loss of a meaningful and effective workday – yes – and all the people I lost with that… none of this stopped me from BAHLOGGGING.

Complacent acceptance of situational PTSD, grief, depression or whatever label could fit for someone else is not the correct answer. No I am not stronger than any one of you, it just appears so because it does. I promise I am no different, no better, no more gracious than any of you would be, in fact my daily maneuvering has probably been far less than most of yours would be. In the most troubling disturbances of life the loss of my Bean, the loss of a child is by far the worst. Then there are the people that have lost more children, entire families, been responsible for their child’s death, seen it, waited for it… There is always what is worse.

Many of you have excused your pains when talking to someone like me, as if pain is measured on a scale of what matters.

Nope. I don’t believe it is. That is part of what made me a good unlicensed psychologist. When pain is present and alive and expressing, there are only the big-eared, hungry demons thinking of the measurements, the ways to make it worse, the plans to compare degrees of suffering, the reasons your pain is so bad, the shoulds and woulds. We have all met the demons, sometimes just passing through a good soul on their way to a land of straight roads and sad strip malls, or the more tethered demons whose life depends on the personality who has embraced them as a way to have fun.

Discarding the demons, when possible, when they make themselves known, or excusing them from our lives can only be good. Builds character. They will convincingly turn sweet and innocent before their exit, but not without trying to turn their supposedly flawless mirror on you.

The sweeter fiend is ego syntonic, and by that I mean it is something that causes no confusion or anxiety because it comes from the inside and is part of us. My own indulgence in complacency is one such imp. But, aha! Since it is not a person other than myself, well then I choose its incarnation. For reasons not yet known to me, staying close to home, submerged in a different feeling of missing her, my own personal demon was not a demon at all but a redo of things already done.

I could say it was a regression, my taking myself away, but thankfully in the service of something. To stay close to something horrific and unfixable is what so many of you bravely, kindly, generously did, and that is what allowed me to hold tight until the next phase. There were no expectations, no desires to control the outcome (like the demons) and no paybacks, debits, or credits.

Being alone, without the structured familiarity of my family, my work, my home, was too sharp a place to process missing her in the deep ways I have needed to. With distance and cold air around me, the feeling of even those of you I do not know made it finite. You provided a way to wait long enough. Then the cold air was gone and all the dilemmas and distractions of living with someone took precedence, even when I owed the world a way to say so. But forgiving Bloggers and friends that you are, I was not called to pay any kind of debt.

Only recently, like very recently, have new things about this life surfaced, but gently like a water flower… no sooner do I reach to touch it then it bobs below some slick surface only to reappear when I am not looking, or in too distant a spot to reach for the moment. It is the same thing, exactly the same thing, just closer up. Love is not enough to resurrect a dead child, or take away the relived moments of stark horror, it is an investment in moving forward to find my way, something that was not there at the moment of the shock.

It started here though. Were it not for the stickwithitness of you, and my friends, the unconditional acceptance of what is (which really you should pat yourselves somewhere for being so enlightened) I could not have recognized the same gifts up close.

As for golf… a game I swore I would never ever play, it is like the things I vaguely included in the “things that would never happen” category. That includes having words and actions of a very special group of Bloggers contribute to a very long, dreadful path towards healing well enough to finally accept closeness.

New things, new stuff, new ways, hope.

With golf, that slow, back and forth progression, so is this, my little life trajectory. If I can give a hoot about an infuriating, little white ball with dimples, then somewhere in me I give a hoot about what can happen next. With the blogamabob, holding it even while mute and quite stupid, was all of what has been given and learned, waiting to be genuinely motivated to play again.

Welcome back. It is a good day for golf.