Boomerang

Sometimes it seems like it would be a lot easier to just lay down all the nonsense.

And by nonsense, you mean nonsense in the truest sense of the word: non-sensical; without reason.

The same children for whom you have loved and fought with all the strength in your fisty-cuff heart, to whom you pump your life blood, the best of your vitality…

Well, come adolescence, they can sometimes turn their backs. As if you’ve suddenly become nothing more than a specter.

A necessary phase, you tell yourself. In order to become the full-fledged, functioning adults you want them to be, they have to differentiate. Individuate. Lean away from the encircling arms of mother so that they can lean into the reliance and discovery of self.

All good, all necessary. But their indifference stings just the same.

Stings like lemon juice in a thumb slice. Like coarse salt vigorously rubbed into raw skin.

What kind of a rational, sense-making universe would prompt a child to coolly disregard its mother and with just the shrug of a shoulder, without even having to utter a word, silently communicate: Yeah, I don’t want your love anymore. Your continued interest and investment in me is nothing more than an intrusion.

Most parents have experienced it. The eyes that sweep right past you, not even pausing to register that your there in the room at all. Yet somehow your parental obligation to supply a steady stream of life’s conveniences remains very much intact. The chauffeur’ing, the laundry folding, the meal prepping, the appointment making. Doesn’t matter. Conveniences should all be there, ready at the quick.

Boomerang, you tell yourself as consolation. These kids will boomerang. There has to be sense to all this love and effort. A lifetime bond for all that rearing: helping them up the slide and down the slide; teaching them to pump their legs on the swing and balance the bicycle. Wiping up the runny noses and fretting over fevers. Playfully dipping them up and down in the shallow end of the pool until they learn that it’s okay to go underwater so long as they remember to pop back up. The hugs and tearful words of comfort after run-ins with schoolyard bullies or collision with a freakish nightmare. The applauding at recitals and hootings of encouragement from the bleachers and sidelines. The homework/chores/teeth-brushing/hair-plaiting/lice-picking days. Days full of a mother’s love for each and every one of them.

Kids grow up. It’s as simple as that. A mother’s grief for the emotional departure of her kids is as old as the hills.

But there are other kinds of nonsense, too. Take, for instance, the wheel you spin at work, ten hours at a stretch. No getting up from your desk since the problems line up at the office door like harried lunch-goers taking tickets at the deli counter. All stress and constipated faces. You spin a wheel like a bingo cage. Give it a twirl and out pops a number. You dutifully call out the number. Beleaguered employees or endless problems – no matter, they match the number on their board and then look up at you, blinking. You call out the next number and then the next and the next. Someone or some problem shouts out “Bingo!” You fully realize that Bingo doesn’t mean anything at all, only that you’ve managed to cover a board for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Then the boards automatically refresh and you start all over again. Not actually going anywhere. No perceived progress. Just a wheel that goes round and round and round and somehow delivers a paycheck.

Although money’s good to have, you don’t kneel to it. It’s a matter of survival, you suppose. Most of us do want to survive. To put bread on the table, a roof over our heads. Electricity in our wires and heat in our pipes. If we’re lucky, we’ll put enough money aside so that we can comfortably grow old, still with a roof over our heads.

And while you’re busy spinning cages, there’s the physical body that’s breaking down. Turn your head too far to one side and out pops a vertebrae. Then starts the domino effect. Bone slips, muscles and cartilage begin to pull. A week and a half of stabbing pain in the back of your neck and shoulder and then a migraine is born. A four-day migraine, squalling and vomiting like an infant.

You become an overnight junkie just to function. Piss-poor sleep because your body can’t get comfortable. You reach for the sleeping pills. You get a miserly minute of chemically-induced unconsciousness, but wake to pain. So you pop a pain-killer in order to face the day. Then you drink coffee so that you’re somewhat cognizant while at work. Now you’re at work, spinning the bingo wheel, drinking more coffee, popping another pain-pill and drying out like South African biltong.

Come 10:00pm, you take a sleeping pill before you even climb into bed because you’re so defeated from the pain and the wheel-spinning and the bloated colleagues and the adolescent rebuff that you already know you won’t fall asleep. Or at least you won’t fall asleep unassisted.

Ah, an assist at last… you begin to drift. But then a flash of desperation startles you back to consciousness. You peer into the darkness.

Why am I doing this?! This is a bunch of thankless nonsense. Nonsense that hurts. Nonsense that’s lonely. Nonsense that’s isolating.

You’re spooning the same lumpy, old pillow you’ve been meaning to replace for months now. With a Tempur-Pedic, perhaps – something that might correct the contorted sleep that birthed the neck trauma. Or perhaps the injury was actually caused by a lack of proper ergonomics. 10 hours a day holding your right hand poised above a keyboard and maneuvering a mouse might very well have born this shitshow. You begin muttering to yourself in the dark of your bedroom, from beneath sweaty bedsheets. A punch-drunk confusion that morphs into prayer.

Maybe ridding yourself of this nonsense is as simple as buying a new pillow. Maybe it’s as simple as getting a job that entails zero cage spinning. Or perhaps it’s as simple as not taking adolescence so seriously and trusting that, even though the kids may drift far from your shore, eventually they will remember you. Perhaps good parenting equates to nothing more than showing your children how you, as a mother, as a woman, as a person, survives. Not only survives, but makes mistakes and slips a little yet still has the wherewithal to stand back up and take another stab at it. Maybe that’s the secret to her survival. Maybe it’s as simple as sourcing the determination and will-power to keep standing up. Stand up, woman! Stand up!

Please, life. Boomerang just a little. Let the goodness come back. The sweet nectar that makes it all worth it. Please…something, someone come back to me. Come back with an extended hand, with a gentle smile, a look of grace to the eyes. Throw me a life line. Offer me the gift of hope. The gift of purpose. The gift of good things to come.

Come to me clutching these good things in your hand like a bouquet of alpine wildflowers. Like crocuses, like forget-me-nots. The very best kind of flower – nothing as sumptuous as a rose or as decadent as a peony, but a resilient, tenacious, to-hell-with-the-rules kind of flower. A tiny, no-nonsense flower that shivers up to standing through an icy snow drift, breaking frozen ground and stretching up on tiptoes in spite of the windchill. All so that she can get the very first sips of sunshine: life-giving, life-warming, life-affirming sunshine.

God bless you, little flower. You are wiser than me. I’m going to study you. I’m going to wriggle in to your bloom. Wear your petals at my waist like a grassy skirt. Move from flower to flower like a hummingbird, like a woodland nymph, like Tinkerbell clutching her tiny lamp and zooming through the night sky in search of her beloved. A lamp that gives chase to the shadows and edges out the night. A  flower that ushers in the thaw of springtime, the warming of the earth and a season of possibility.

Boomerang, you will. Boomerang, because that’s the spirit you have inside you.