Life is no crystal stair or rose-colored vision of great imaginings or grave hauntings. Waking up and managing until slumbering again is dirty, tough work. Slogging through some days and coasting on others, nary a soul enters the universe who does not feel. Humans suffer. It is my principal principle as is its inverse, humans hope. On this continuum of birth and death, we shape our genetically imbued temperaments and bodies in community with others. To surrender, crying is cathartic. To endure, laughing is mandatory. Weeping or guffawing without a thought is a reaction, an integration of sensory and spiritual existence. When time seeps into the process, digesting and unfolding feelings becomes labor. In this space is suffering and hope. The machinations of mental musings manipulate — how to emote and how to cope.
As February bitterly closes down, my soul senses spring, a warming to changes, to growth, and to freshness. Throughout February I yearn to hibernate into the mental musings this short increasingly lighter month provides, but teaching, parenting and managing a household do not lend themselves to hibernation. February is the drudgery, the gore, the fumbling for hope in a 28 day span that is marketed to promote all things love.
This compact month drives my souls to contemplate the whys which I avoid.
Three years ago in January my blog went public on Facebook as we delved into the medical morass of our lives. Many things are improved and many things chronic. No one expects to parent through the lens of forever ill kids. As a new parent, I wondered and worried over what might be fatal but never contemplated the load that one bears when faced with everyday.
And I did not understand or grasp that fortitude is the elixir. February’s surrender to dark refuels.
Wrapping up in flannel sheets with movies does not wash away the the dirty floors or toilets or magically make headaches vanish or fears dissipate, but like a hug it is my cocoon. Getting out of my own way, I am gratefully never granted a full retreat courtesy of swimming. I time life’s measurements in seconds down to the hundredths place — for others. Aching for my own race and moment, I must make it to the 28th to march into March with my mental musings behind me.
Four years out, Houlder copes. He is 18 and instead of being able to gloriously revel in youth must moderate his life every moment. Little is care-free. Youthful abandon is not an option. But — and it is a but of resistance and in that is hope — there is a future. His forward motion is measured in those infernal milliseconds. He will graduate in May. He will go to Kenyon in the fall. He will have completed two and half full years of high school. He will succeed despite the gray cloak.
February grants me permission to scream and rage against injustice, to pull against the forces, to wallow in the grimy griping. But like a bad B movie, the month ends with my monster rising out of the mud and clunking forward toward its next target. Hope is the target as I wash off the sludge and primordial ooze.
