Flowers Fall: October 2011

Letting Go

by Bethany Saltman, September 28, 2011

There is so much wrong in the world.

And so maybe because of the sad and desperate flooding of our valley and its fragile towns, or maybe because one of my oldest, dearest friends (my age) was just diagnosed with ovarian cancer, or maybe because yesterday was the 10th anniversary of 9/11, maybe because a young girl I know is being taken off her ventilator to die...maybe because I have been bracing myself for the end of summer—the heat, late nights, sweaty kids, tomatoes.

There are so many good reasons to have missed this. And yet today, the day I dropped A off for her first day of kindergarten, I noticed that fall is here, and it’s actually really beautiful. When did it happen? When did the curled-up leaves blow on to our deck? When did the light change from funky summer softness to this silver sun, brightening every edge?

It’s been a long year. Last winter and its dumps of snow, freezing cold, and weekly preschool cancellations got me thinking about Florida way more than any self-respecting Northerner should. T and I pulled a bloated dead raccoon through a hole in our basement wall. My various crises of identity have loomed so large at times it’s been hard to even see, let alone appreciate, the bounty that is, today, so obvious. And when I’m not feeling the love, it’s awfully hard to feel any gratitude. So the whole thing can get pretty small, and a little dark. And familiar.

When I was A’s age, being dropped off into my life, I felt like I was already in the middle of a freefall, so it wasn’t much of a transition, shall we say. And I remember feeling incredulous that anything would be asked of me. My mom, who demanded so little (for better or for worse), would occasionally enlist my help in emptying the dishwasher or setting the table. I balked, feeling—though definitely not saying out loud—that I never asked to be born, and how dare you (perpetrator of my aliveness) add one bit of misery to my burden. I swear, I had these thoughts, often.

It is only recently, humbled as I have been by the love I feel for my daughter and the desire to do right by her, that I have sat with and uncovered some of these fundamental beliefs I hold about being a human being, and the ways in which I carry these ideas into my parenting. For instance, the sad, quiet truth of feeling like I have wronged A by bringing her into this world, and my scrambling to try to make it right. And then making a mess of that, getting impatient, the grip of my assumptions getting tighter and tighter.