Love, Devotion, Missing You, and the Traumatized Brain

One reason I look forward to flying cross country is that I know it will be a time to have new thoughts and to make new habits. It’s so much easier to change in new surroundings. The same old habits don’t catch you quite as much, reminding you of what to do and think next.

Sometimes, often, when I want to change, I don’t even know exactly what or how. I just feel stale or habituated and I want to wake up.

This trip, however, I had an agenda. I wanted to change the way my brain thinks about life, people, and love.

I have noticed that I don’t do that well when people leave. Even hanging up the phone at the end of a conversation can feel like a form of leaving. Even when the leaving was mutual: two people hanging up the phone. It’s hard to form connections when the micro-leavings feel so final. The temptation to end relationships before they have chance to root is so strong. Anything to avoid the confused heartbreak of feeling abandoned.

I didn’t know how to process my daughter leaving for college. I had worked her whole life to encourage her to be independent, to be able to leave when the time came, a skill I had not learned with my own mother. With my mom, staying with her had felt like a commitment, like proof that I loved her. When I left for college (again and again and again) I felt both liberated and awful—like I had stretched the cord attaching us too far and she would no longer feel I loved her. I could leave her, therefore my love must not be real. And so I would drop out and come back. Much to my mother’s dismay. Her dismay was confusing to me because my heart thought my returning was part of our deal. My heart believe my mother needed me to return. I had no idea what it meant to love or be loved. Mostly I just felt wrong, lousy.

When my mom died, she left. It has been nearly ten years (I have no idea the actual number and don’t want to know, really) and I still can barely stand to see her siblings. I don’t know what to do with reminders of her. For my birthday this year, my father gave me a framed photograph of the two of them together, and I looked at it for about two seconds before putting it down to thank him. I don’t want to see her. She left.

But, as with so many things when the brain is reeling from trauma, there is another side to this story which is equally true. The other day Facebook showed me a photo I had posted years ago of my mom looking out at the ocean, and I wrote over it, I see you, Mom, and posted it again.

No one sees my mom like I do, is my belief. I think I loved her the most.

What I mean is that I needed her the most and felt the most unfulfilled and so am filled with the most longing.

I think to love means to long for.

Historically, I have fallen in love with men who are unavailable. Distance, marriage, addiction issues: all of these are solid walls between me and you. All of these things allow me to exist in a state of longing, love’s clean-handed sister. Longing has none of the yuckiness of love. Longing leaves no fingerprints. Longing doesn’t have room for heated arguments and the negotiation of space that comes with genuine closeness.

I met a woman once who chewed her food and then spit it into a bag. In this way, she could eat (okay, chew) whatever she wanted and stay very thin. I think she longed for food, but she didn’t love it. I think, probably, also, she longed for life but fear of losing control kept her from loving it.

I think living in a state of longing is like not fully enjoying your meal. Living in a state of longing may be secretly a way to keep one from having to deal with the consequences of loving.

And this brings me to love. To me, love means my heart feels open and my hands feel grabby. I want what I love. I love so many things, so many ideas, so many people. If you are reading this, chances are good I love you. I love the coffee I am drinking. I love my computer. I love Pam who is sitting on the couch with me, doing her work. I love Davis, California, where I am today. I also love Boston, Massachusetts, where I was yesterday! I love my daughter.

I am learning I can love what is also at a distance. The two people I am closest to, my daughter and my best friend, I also live thousands of miles from. I am learning the extended peek-a-boo that I never got with my first mother. I am learning that when people leave, they also come back. I am learning that the cord I think is supposed to exist between two people—an imagined cord but one that feels real, feels limited in its ability to stretch—is perhaps leftover umbilical confusion. A cord is not something that either binds two people together or is cut and the cutting then creates a forever separation.

I am learning it’s okay to individuate. That being your own person does not mean you can’t full love another. I am so proud of my daughter’s ability to live her life without having to constantly prove to me she loves me. She is her own person. Maybe this is how a mother bird feels when she watches her baby fly away. We did it. No wonder leaving the nest has become such a cliché. It’s the perfect image.

We use the word love to connect, and we also use it to create boundaries. When people write “love you” to me, I think it is so funny. There’s no subject in the sentence, only a verb and an object. Who loves me? “Love u” is even funnier!

I have stood in front of people and a minister and I have worn a dress (!!!) and shoes (well, once) and promised to love a man until I died. The promise stuck, but my behavior was terrible. I did and do love both men, and I acted like a spoiled child in our relationships. I didn’t act like a lover—I acted like someone terrified she wasn’t getting her needs met. I acted like a gorilla that someone was trying to put into captivity.

But enough about that.

I tattooed “love” on my wrist when my mom died. I copied her handwriting (just as I had done when I was younger and forged a check on her account to myself for fifteen hundred dollars) because I wanted to hold myself accountable. I handed the tattoo artist the word on a slip of paper, and she copied my copy of my mother’s writing. If I wanted love, I wasn’t going to let myself run from that desire. I was going to literally wear in on the sleeve of my arm. I wrote it in my mom’s hand to remind myself that I loved her, that she loved me, and that it still wasn’t enough. I had to commit myself to learning about love so that when I die, my own daughter will write love in her own hand, not mine.

So this brings me to devotion. The older I get, the more aware I am of how little time I may have left here on the planet. I have a sense of urgency to live my life in a way that feels true to my spirit because I see spirit as a gift from the universe, and if I don’t fully experience it, I have denied the universe the pleasure of seeing its flower bloom. I’ve been blogging daily because I recently realized I am devoted both to my love of writing and to my ability to help other people who feel stuck find ways to write their truths.

It was the word devotion that changed everything for me, not the word love. I know I love writing. I know I love teaching. I can stand still and love so hard it hurts, but maybe then nothing gets accomplished. Devotion, to me, invites action. I am devoted to my love of writing, not necessarily to writing itself. I wake up every morning and write because I love to do that, and I am devoted to that action because of the love. I need devotion to help me prioritize what I do during the day. I can love writing all I want, but if I’m not devoted to the act, I may never actually write.

This means I do not wait for inspiration. Devotion leads me by the hand and tells me to write, regardless of what my brain tells me. Suddenly there is no room for not good enough because devotion doesn’t care about judgement. This, to me, is the sound of devotion: is https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2bosouX_d8Y. Devotion is the sound of hands in dirt, footsteps in the rain, the night-time whisper of “everything will be okay”. Devotion is how my dog used to look at me and is also the reason I have not been able to get another dog.

I am devoted to my daughter. This means, her behavior is irrelevant. If she became a serial killer, I would be just as devoted to her as I am now. This means I would show up. I would care for her well-being as much as I care for my own.

I think the tricky thing with devotion is that the very thing that makes it magical: the putting aside of ego, could be the thing that turns devotion into something like co-dependence. In the same way that water can both keep you alive or kill you, devotion can feed your soul or extinguish it.

It’s all so personal.

Historically, when people go away, I think this means our relationship is over because they have left me. This is my lizard brain re-enacting what happened when the separation from my first mother became permanent before I had the ability to understand or talk about what was happening. I live with the mistaken belief that love is transactional. If I give you this, you will give me that. I have to talk myself out of this mindset. I have to train myself not to believe myself.

I believe devotion is the way for me to live closest to my heart. It means, to me, rigor and commitment and faith. It means I have to cut down the noise in my life so I can better hear what is truly important.

I want to tell you that it’s 6:12 a.m. Pam and I have been up working since 4:30. I came to Davis so we could re-invent our adoptee retreats and this afternoon and tomorrow we will do that work. Right now, we are both focused on our devotions: I am working on my writing, and Pam is working on hers.

I’m tired, but that’s okay. I can sleep later.