More on Square One

I feel like our country is in Square One. Yesterday I watched a video of ICE descending on and violently separating a mother and her two children in Worcester, Massachusetts. I watched a neighborhood of people flooding the street as this incident occurred, fighting back, getting arrested. I closed my computer and sat on the couch and shook.

The cataclysmic event that instigated my cultural self turning into Square One was when Trump was reelected. Part of me went into meltdown and turned into human soup. If Trump could be President again after clearly marking himself a belligerent thug who ran on the fumes of hate, I no longer knew who I was in my country. A melted down caterpillar can’t do shit out in the world because its legs have disappeared, and the wings are not even yet a dream.

I feel like much of the country is in this state: watching Trump from the position of soup, having an inherent inability to make a plan and to figure out how to be in this kind of world. Part of being in Square One, to me, is being in shock. The world was one way: your husband was alive, your dog was healthy, your body reacted predictably when you walked up stairs, people stayed in their lanes when they drove—and then suddenly your husband and your dog are dead, your knees give out when you take a step, someone hits you head on as you drive home, and everything changes. You are not who you were.

Our culture is not supportive of Square One. People don’t usually get to stay home for a year or two after a spouse dies or after they give birth. We have “leave”, and “leave” is generally in terms of weeks, if not “week”. As a culture, we are afraid, I think. of change.

It has been an amazing experience this past year to watch myself to be in Square One. To not only watch, but to allow myself to be there. Back in August, after the thrill of arriving in California and filling my little rental house with new furniture, new forks and knives and a blender and everything since I had arrived only with two suitcases of clothes and my yoga mat and Bird, back when I was in Square Three, the hero’s journey square, the square where the butterfly is chewing its way out of its cocoon and things are happening, I crashed back down into Square One when I learned the truth about something.

I had come to California because I thought a good mother did not live across the country from her daughter. I had come back to California because my work in Boston was done, and I could now return and be what I’d been when I’d known myself and my role the most clearly: a mother. I was going to prove to my daughter that I loved her, that I was here for her if she needed me. I was going to step even more firmly into that role—in a sense reclaiming her since it had been ten years since she’d flown the coop for college and had done well, had made the break, had thrived.

But now I was going to be an easy drive away in case she fell down and needed a band aid or a shoulder to cry on.

My twenty-eight-year-old daughter, I discovered, had her own stash of band aids and had created a life where she had shoulders that were not mine to cry on if she needed them.

My parents were dead so I was no longer needed as a daughter. My daughter was grown up so she no longer needed me as a child needs a mother.

What was my purpose? If it was not to make my parents or my daughter happy, why was I on the planet?

I’d created this nest for myself. I was in a safe, beautiful place, I had work I loved that only took a few hours a week, I had money in the bank, I had my daughter an easy drive away, I had people who loved me, I had a body that worked, I had Bird.

So what.

Having all this time and space to figure out who I was and what I wanted might sound like a wonderful, exciting opportunity, but it didn’t feel like that. It felt like someone was telling me it was time to run a marathon when all I wanted to do was to lie down and do nothing.

Holy cow, being in Square One and dissolving and being soup takes tenacity and faith. When you don’t want to do anything or be anything and yet you still keep going because some part of you is able to say, This too shall pass, is being a human being living in relationship with the divine, is what I think. The ability for some small part of you to feel hope when the rest of you is self-erasing is an incredible gift. Someone was holding my hand through this, is what I think.

From the outside (and from the inside), Square One can look and feel like depression, so that was also part of the challenge for me. To not worry about myself as month after month passed and I could not find any scrap of dream in my mind for my future.

And then, a month or so ago, I discovered Furnished Finders and something shifted in my mind. I could feel the idea of wings take shape in my being. For hours and hours, I looked online at furnished apartments and houses all over the country that I could rent for months at a time. Holy cow, I thought, I could live like that. I could do one of the things I liked to do most, move, and not have to worry about owning stuff. I could be free.

Freedom is my number one value, and to live in alignment with my values lends to, for me, feelings joy and hope. What if I could be both a good mother and free at the same time? What if I could love my daughter from, say, Martha’s Vineyard?

I started to dream of all the places I could go. Hello, Square Two.

And then I sent my deposit for two months on Martha’s Vineyard. Hello, Square Three.

Martha teaches that the change cycle spirals forward: we move between the four stages, stumbling, for example, in Square Three as we work to realize our dreams only to go back to Square One for a bit to dissolve until we figure out a new way to engage with whatever it is we stumbled over. Square Four is the butterfly out in the world, doing its thing. Square Four is kind of funny to me because it’s when things are going well, and, for someone like me, that can actually get a little boring. And so someone like me invites in change just to be in the soup again.

I woke up this morning and prayed for the woman and I saw yesterday on the news. I prayed for her children. I prayed for the ICE agents who think these people are enemies and not family.

May the world wake up soon and find ways to keep ourselves and our neighbors safe. May we feel loved. May we love.

Gosh, writing is hard. I feel like I’m trying to present you with an onion—Square One has so many layers—and then I hand you this flat piece of paper.

I’m going to keep chipping away at it because I have a lot to say about this stage. I didn’t even tell you about taking the art off my walls or bringing most of my clothes to Goodwill or not feeling joy when looking at flowers or not writing or talking much to friends because I had nothing to say. I love, love, love learning what I’m learning from Martha Beck and her team because, finally, I’m breaking free from patterned thinking and realizing there’s a whole other world out there, inside of me.