I believed in the last few years that I could find a way to be of service through writing as I once served daily in the classroom. I had to believe I could make this transition because, like it or not, my life was demanding that I find the way. With two small children (one of whom has the energy of two or three children combined) I was faking it and clearly not making it. I was getting super sick and I wasn't willing to do what needed to be done to adapt to my radically changed, almost unrecognizable, new life. So, as I've witnessed happen to hundreds of women before me, my most rough and tumble coping mechanisms volunteered as "the heavies" and arrived to change my life for me.
Dissociative episodes returned first and even though in the past I've been really good at duping those around me that "no, no, nothing's wrong" either the episodes got worse or the people around me, students included, got better at sensing when my authentic self was on a walk-about. No one was buying it anymore. Especially me. My shame arrived next to "save me" from being exposed by the episodes and like a black curtain it started closing up all my work opportunities in mid-run. I let my jobs drop to the floor like dead leaves. So quiet, no one even heard it happening really. I just evaporated from life outside of our children's lives.
I placed the blame on easy scape goats; my cancer scare, my severe anemia, or whatever else my tanking immune system let in the front door. With all resources being shunted to a nervous system stuck in sympathetic overdrive, I was a physical mess. Which, sadly is so much easier to own than being a psychological mess. As I stayed on the path of denial more of the usual characters started invisibly shuffling in to have a talk with me. I listened but didn't act. My self-injury thoughts are so familiar now that their shtick is almost boring and I know better than to work with my thoughts when it comes to severe anxiety. I relied on breath, the last few friends who knew how to navigate my PTSD mine-field without detonating anything, and lastly but there in a pinch, I had Xanax.
I managed for about a year this way and then that shred of "healthy self" that I had locked away inside made an unsanctioned call and brought in the big gun. I heard its heavy footsteps coming and, as anyone with it can attest, I could do nothing to stop it. Major depression arrived and sat on me until I cried "uncle." (Actually, I cried "Mom!") And, then it was all over. The next thing that I remember I "came to" under the tattered and familiar fabric of my personal red tent. Not the luscious and lively tent I'd been raising for a decade for other women. But my own, profoundly personal, red tent made up of five women, that when called, rally.
It was decided that I was bleeding out and it was time for a bolder step. It was time to go. Like now. To get the hell out of hell, entrust myself and my children to mother nature, lick my wounds, and begin again - walking my own talk and teachings..
I told no one else of my plan because I knew that the plan was right, and I knew that it would work, and I knew that it was crazy, and most importantly I knew that I wouldn't survive anyone's doubt. Not this time. So, I quietly vanished.
We are settling in close to nature on a small island an hour ferry ride from the mainland. I can tell that this self-sequestering was one of them most important decisions of my life. I can also see the disappearing act that got me here as an abandonment of my students, of many friendships, and of the red tent values of connection and community around which I have encouraged so many women to congeal. From the outside, my middle of the night departure looks more like something from the life of a carnie than a community instigator. It smells sharp, it feels a little creepy, and it is full of shadows all of which make it the perfect first experience for me to catch RedHanded.
RedHanded is obviously a play on the old phrase about "catching someone in the act" (usually a questionable act). If anything my goal with the blog is to inspire us to maintain playfulness, levity, candor, humor, and hope while doing the difficult and essential work of catching ourselves, each other, and our over-culture in some of our most complicated, controversial, and important acts. I've quoted Pema Chodron many times in my teaching women in recovery. One of her simplest quotes, "We must practice non-aggressively catching ourselves" has long guided my teaching and it will continue to guide me through this blog. It is my goal to catch myself gently; where I am in denial, where I am not living authentically, where I am hiding in the shadow. I want to catch our culture too, by questioning patriarchy and what it continues to do to women, children, men, and the earth itself.
Over the last decade I often told clients that the mission of my little red tent was to "reclaim the curse" and challenge the messages we receive as women about our bodies. When I suggested that rather than being a broken, bloody mess of a burden, our bodies just might be our greatest blessing, I was most often met with the spontaneous laughter of disbelief. Over time, however, if a woman kept at least one foot under the tent, that blurt almost always steeped into the long rolling laughter of excited, deep belief. Such authentic laughter was the tell for me that we'd gotten another one back. Another woman had recovered her original self and was seated again in her power with her funny bone mended and her wish-bone nestled again close to her heart.
It took motherhood to help me fully understand the dynamics of laughter and power. As a mother (physical tickling excluded) any instigator of laughter is my greatest weapon in parenting power struggles. Levity trumps the iron fist every time and when it comes to power it turns out that humor and playfulness are much more fun and effective than guilt and shame. My findings in parenting my children are converging with my observations of women re-parenting themselves - our best hope is to find the humor in it. Like environmental educator David Orr suggests - we can choose to live a comedy or a tragedy as we confront and hopefully attempt to change our ecological fate. Like Dr. Anita Johnston has the courage to suggest in her professional trainings for eating disorder specialists, "we know how serious this is, we know women are starving themselves to death, it is our job to help them lighten up about it." It seems that the old adage is true, if you can't laugh about it you definitely aren't taking it seriously enough.
Under The Red Tent we found that storytelling was an excellent way to catch ourselves taking things too seriously (in the unproductive way) - especially our shame. So many times I saw a woman start to narrate her rock-bottom moment in a shame-spiral and then, aided by the natural shift into witness consciousness that so often occurs with storytelling, she would pull herself right up and out into altitudes of wisdom, and even gratitude. The spontaneous buoyancy usually came from the moments of absurdity, or hidden beauty and strength, that are often uncovered in a retelling.
I spent a decade listening to, learning from, and guiding women in this unfolding of their personal "herstory". And then, I became a mother. And, I promptly lost my own way. As soon as I realized I was adrift and no longer tethered to my practices, I dropped the burden of being "a teacher".
Now, I am here.
It is my time to focus on healing and writing with courage.
RedHanded is starting off with the mother-lode as I am catching what feels like the shamiest experience of my shame riddled life. I am "catching gently" something about my life that for two years I've denied, and hid, and hated until last week I seemingly effortlessly admitted. I am a mother who suffers and grapples with mental illness.
While writing a piece for thewarthogschool.blogspot.com I finally coupled together the two internal experiences that up until that moment had repelled like magnets: "mothering" and "mental illness".
They reacted with force. Harsh judgments like: crazy, undone, untrustworthy, dangerous came first to mind. Then, a full color image was fleshed out that was, in my best summation, the soccer-mom-anti-christ. The mother doing everything wrong, the mother ruining her children's chances, the mother who can't be trusted with anyone's children, including her own. That was just the beginning of the culturally condoned judgment I've internalized and unleashed upon myself.
In our harsh and misunderstanding culture, when it comes to the stigma of mental illness there is a special hell reserved just for mothers. It's walls are covered with impossibly idealistic advertisements of modern day motherhood and yellowed newspaper clippings vilifying the most mentally ill mothers of our recent history. The walls also hold photos of the childhoods that are slipping away like sand while a mother struggles to recover her healthy self.
It is a scary place.
Long before I visited it myself I counseled other mother's as they struggled with their mental health. They were giving up meth, giving up binging 6 times a day, giving up an affair... they were giving up "giving up". I feel a wave of sheepish flush at least once a day as I recount the days of counseling those mother's before I myself had felt the weight of the mantle. (How could I know, just how much I couldn't know, until I'd stepped into those particular red shoes?) It is my hope that in my non-initiated way I did more good than harm. One thing I can say for certain, and with great relief, it is that I saw them as heroines. I didn't see them through the same harshly judgmental lens that has shamed me into hiding over the last few years.
So, as I launch Red Handed, I launch myself into my own recovery (again) by gently catching myself, with my own motherly love and saying out loud that I will no longer be silenced by shame. So I've got a bag of hammers like the rest of us and some of what's clanking around in there can be labeled by the DSM-V. I am still a safe person with whom you can leave your child and last I checked my own kids are turning out pretty neato and whole. Yes, I cancel appointments sometimes because my PTSD is triggered, or I have to take a personal time out, call in back up, and cry really hard to a friend for a while so my past childhood doesn't get tangled up with their present. But, all in all, my mental wellness far outweighs my mental illness. For me, when I'm not living in shame induced denial, my experience of mental illness is like a cold. When I come down with it, I stay away from others, I protect my children from catching it, I blow my nose a lot, and then I'm usually on my feet again in a day or two. That's really it. I'm not the image our culture has affixed to the label. I'm not limping down the street, yelling obscenities, hair matted and mouth foaming with my children long lost to the gutter. Yet, let yourself be silenced by shame long enough and who knows what is possible….the cold becomes severe anemia…and so forth…
It is time to be brave again.
Autumn has always been my favorite time of year, and has become even more so since my years with The Red Tent on Rose Avenue. Within that womb-like studio autumn was the season of women showing up to be the heroine. They lined up at the door ready to face their own shadows, to kiss themselves awake, and to save their own lives. This first autumn on the island my harvest is from that heirloom seed; The heroine. My harvest is also a new understanding of enough. It's more like a expletive than a measure of bounty this year. "Enough!" I've had enough of denial and shame. I've had enough of what is happening to women, and children, and the earth. It is my hope that Red Handed will inspire and assist women to continue the work of saving their authentic selves and the earth itself. It is also my hope that after some time in the woods, I will write, and rite, and right myself to the point of being ready to raise the red fabrics and gather again, in person, in circle.
