A Fork in the Road and Cracks in the Walls

The birds they sang
at the break of day
Start again
I heard them say
Don't dwell on what
has passed away
or what is yet to be.

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That's how the light gets in.

(Leonard Cohen passed away yesterday and these words seemed appropriate.)


Where does a story begin? I've felt stumped as to where to begin The Unraveling. It's like asking someone the question, "Who are you and how did you get here?" How do you answer? There's a lifetime of story behind Today. So we'll just start with the Move. There were years before that event that will be interwoven or just have to be told another time.

-------------------------

2011 started off shaky. Newly pregnant with four other little children - a 10 month old, a three year old, a five year old, and a seven year old. Nels was working all the time - between 50 and 90 hours a week. If we wanted to go on an outing or on a trip to visit the grandparents or even out to LUNCH (or sleep through the night), we could never be sure there wouldn't be a phone call with some dire emergency that only Nels could handle (apparently). He almost never came with us. "Never Not A Crisis" was our Melaleuca motto.  

Weirdly, though, as the year rolled along I became really content. I felt like I had learned how to manage our family and my emotions without Nels, I had four beautiful little girls and another one on the way, the house was too small but we'd figure that out later. I had a calling as a teacher that I loved. I'd spent hundreds of hours painting and decorating and digging and planting - I was at peace with our home. There were times that the frustration of the inevitable call from Nels at 4:55pm telling me that he wasn't sure when he'd be home (7:30? midnight? tomorrow evening?) would get to me, but most of the time I could roll with it.

There was one evening in June that I couldn't, though. I was folding laundry, I got the call. I crumbled. It all was just too much. I remember just laying down on the concrete laundry room floor and sobbing. Nels had been applying to different jobs for years and nothing had panned out. I'd encouraged him to just quit, to just tell them NO, to have ANY kind of boundary - but he couldn't even imagine what that meant and felt like I was invalidating how hard he was working when I'd suggest it. He was working to death, living on sugar and caffeine, and more often than not sick when he wasn't working. I knew he wasn't doing well, I was exhausted of either being disappointed or not caring, and . . . just too much. I prayed and bawled and told God that we'd do anything. Just please help something to change.

Then I stood up and got on with life - like I do.

One night Nels mentions in passing that he'd sent his resume to a company called Coldwater Creek in northern Idaho. I didn't think much of it. A few days later he tells me that they want to do a phone interview with him. I feel a little nervous, but brush it off. The interview went perfect and three weeks later they'd like him to fly up and meet them in person. I start into full-on panic mode. I'm 8 weeks from my due date and Nels is working a bajillion hours getting ready for Convention and where the hell is Sandpoint?

When Nels was offered the job, we had this enormous decision to make. We didn't know which was the right path to take. Stay or go? Sure, I'd told God that I'd do anything, but...right NOW?! A spontaneous trip to check out North Idaho, insomnia, interviewing, Nels never home, a trip to Utah, getting ready for school to start, anxiety, researching home prices, my feet swelling up like hot water bottles. Nels's job was awful, but it was also stable. We'd built a life and had good friends in Idaho Falls. It was affordable. Sandpoint is an expensive resort town far away from shopping, family, friends, and everything we'd ever known. Coldwater Creek was a company that was struggling. I was a month from having Clara and a hot mess. 

But finally we made the decision. We listed our house. We had a baby.

The plan was that Nels would go to Sandpoint and start working and the girls and I would stay in Idaho Falls and work on selling the house. It made sense. We absolutely could. not. afford two mortgages at the same time. Besides, I felt like I'd been doing the single-parent-hold-down-the-fort thing for years. I could handle a couple months. I DIDN'T need Nels. I could handle the new baby and two kids in school and keeping the house ready for showings... It would be fine. I can do it all. Above all else, I can TAKE CARE OF MYSELF.

Four days after Clara was born Nels and I took a drive up to Sandpoint to look at houses for sale and to find him a studio apartment to rent until we'd be able to join him. Both apartments and houses turned out to be much more expensive and much less impressive in person than they'd been online. I honestly remember nothing about that trip except crying nearly the entire eight hours home. I could feel in my heart that I'd been lying to myself. I'd built these walls that said "I'm fine, I can do it all on my own, I don't need Nels to feel happy." And some of that was true. Years of learning how to clean and cook and travel and parent without being able to plan on Nels being around had taught me some beautiful independence, but I DID need him - and even more than that, I wanted Nels - and that realization terrified me. It seems so crazy when I write it out, but if I needed him, if I wanted him . . . I could also be hurt. I couldn't really look at it, but the last four years of him working late, constantly calling and saying he wouldn't be able to be home for dinner or bedtime or that trip we were planning or even just because I MISSED HIM - it hurt. It hurt when he'd take on jobs and projects and interests and service outside our family - not because I didn't want him to do anything but be at home, but because I always felt like we were last on his priorities. He was my best friend, but I couldn't count on him to be there for me. And over the course of those five hundred miles from Sandpoint to Idaho Falls, all the walls I'd built around my heart were cracking, falling down brick by brick. I hated myself for building them between me and my best friend and I was scared to death of taking them down.

It sounds so melodramatic, but it's true. I'd had a baby five days earlier - my body, my emotions, and my spirit were exhausted and I didn't have it in me to keep lying to myself. I really liked and missed my husband.

Imagine that. 

The End of the Runway

"What you've been doing for the last six years, is that you've been increasing and picking up speed, you're still a little bit on the runway. You're accelerating toward something. But now, that gnawing feeling that you have, that feeling of 'being stuck', is telling you that you're done with the runway. You're done. You needed it. It's beautiful. Thank it. It got you moving. And now you're racing down the runway and if you don't do the lift-off right now, you're going to crash your plane into a bunch of houses on the other side of the highway. . . . And you couldn't have done it if you didn't have those six years of build up." -- Elizabeth Gilbert in an episode of her "Magic Lessons" podcast

(August 2011) "I feel like I've been smashing down all relevant feelings because they do THIS to me. I've been avoiding the questions - and to some extent productive actions - because when I don't, I can't sleep and I feel really overwhelmed. It's so much easier to not think about."

(November 2011) "Sometimes I feel like I don't even recognize my life."

(January 2012) "I read through my words from yesteryear and can remember who I was then. I am amazed at how it feels so effortless. Who is that girl? Where did she go? Will I ever see her again? I miss Home."

(May 2012) "I've had this crazy underlying tension, always lying in wait for when I get too tired or too hormonal or . . . something. My problem is that, like a chemical reaction or a math equation, I seem to think that I'm going to figure it out some day. I can't to do it and it's making me crazy."

(January 2013) "...more than any one of those things, I want to feel happy. I want to feel peace in my own skin and in my own life. And it's difficult for me to figure out how to reconcile failed desires and how to feel happy with ME."

(July 2013) "I've always written pretty honestly on my blog, but even with my openness there are still parts of myself that I guard pretty fiercely and whose existence I don't always like to admit to, even with myself. It's been scary for me to explore these areas, but I've come to see that they are the answer to my question. I feel as though the past two years have been filled with pruning. When contemplating our move to Sandpoint two years ago, I imagined the future and myself to be different than they are today. At times I have felt a mourning cry from within. 'How could you do this to me? I was making such wonderful growth and now you've cut me down.' I have mourned for that feeling of home and stability. I have mourned for the relationship that I once had with the Lord. I have mourned for the vision that I had of me."

(November 2013) "As I sat down just now, the Post Screen felt foreign to me --- wondering what it is that is inside. What is it I want to share? I don't even know."

(July 2014) "I think my brain got jammed up with "heavy" the last few years and before I can open it back up, I'm going to have to unload some of my weightier thoughts in written form. These bigger, denser thoughts all kind of string together and don't allow me to package them into the neat little parcels that I've enjoyed in the past. I have to find a new way of writing."

(January 2015) "I haven't written much in the last few years: it's really hard to sift out what's relevant and true while so much change is taking place."

I'm so thankful for this little blog; for this place where I can revisit and remember nearly ten years of Rachel. A place where I can see growth. A place where I can see the happy and hopeful and peaceful and joy-filled Rachel. A place where I can also see (between the lines) the depressed and anxious and angry and exhausted Rachel. I wish I could have written that girl better. As I revisit the years, I see her in glimpses, like the ones above, but the truth is I didn't know her. I've only more recently come to accept her and begin to understand her. "You can't give people what you don't have."

If I had to give a title to the last five+ years it would be, Part 1: The Slow and Steady Unraveling of Rachel. It's been a hugely painful and annoying story for me, but I'm finding that what I'm left with is just Me. I don't fully know this Rachel, but I'm not scared of what I'm going to discover either. I feel like "Part 1" is closing and it's time for me to understand it and share it, because "Part 2" is beginning. I'm at the end of the runway and part of Lift I need (so that all of this work doesn't leave me smashed into the houses) is to own this story and write it down.

"We can't chart a new course until we find out where we are, how we came to that point and where we want to go." ~ Brene Brown