Over the Edge
I am one of those annoying people that frequently starts sentences with “My therapist said…” For what it’s worth, it is always said with the requisite twinge of self-consciousness.
But I do it because my therapist really says the best things. As good therapists should.
We are conscious and unconscious thinking beings, she tells me. And I say, that’s why we need someone we can trust to point out all the unconscious stuff so we don’t act like assholes on autopilot, doomed to repeat the same bullshit patterns over and over, ad infinitum.
But this isn’t about the value of therapy. It’s about something my therapist said, natch.
I need lots of help with parenting. (We all do, right? If you just said no, then you’re probably lying.) Because that shit is hard. And single parenting? I can’t even. So, one day, after recounting yet another disastrous moment, my therapist informed me that I needed to be okay with letting my daughter “come up against the hard edge of herself.”
What she meant by this is that place where we are wrong or limited or out of line or out of control. And we have to own it. Some of us know when we have come to this place — we call these people accountable—and some of us do not. Because we are conscious and unconscious thinking beings. One of the jobs of parenting is to help our kids find this place. That’s what limits are for. But I digress…
Several weeks later, back in the chair, I was spinning through what has become a canyon of a story over the last 8 years: I’m stuck. In a tiny town full of families and college students, with a kid and limited opportunities for romance, work, and adventure.
“And that right there is your edge,” the therapist said.
Boom. Mic dropped.
In that moment, slamming face first into a wall of my own making, my unconscious became conscious. And to be honest, I wept.
No amount of lamenting, kvetching, or crying was going to change the fact that I have limits, because of my choices.
It’s funny though, because choice got me into this mess and it’s also what, after some humbling introspection, got me out.
The truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.
-Joe Klaas
Byron Katie teaches that “we attach to uninvestigated concepts that we believe to be true in the moment,” and it’s those stories — our own thoughts —that cause us to suffer. So we must take these stories and beliefs “to inquiry.” Starting with the simple question, Is it true?
Is it true that I can’t leave, move someplace bigger, with more opportunities and single 30-something men?
Once upon a time I would have said, “You’re motherfucking right it’s true!” But from my edge I can see that no, it’s not true at all.
I could leave.
I couldn’t live with the consequences of that choice though — abandoning my daughter or uprooting her from her dad and the place she happily calls home.
It turns out I stay because in choosing to become a parent, I chose to put someone else’s needs before my desires. Even when I momentarily resent those needs because the hungry ghosts of my unmet desires feel as though they’ll gnaw me to the bone.
What’s true is that I make the choice not to pick up and head for greener pastures every day. Because I love her. Because when I look, deep down, more than romance or work or adventure I want to be the kind of mom that shows up, even when it’s hard.
I find room to breathe in this practice of questioning the things that, uninvestigated, make me want to kick and scream and curse a blue streak. Which makes sense. I mean, when you’ve come to the edge you are at the end of the tired territory of what you know and the beginning of the wide open possible space that stretches beyond.
There’s always another choice available to you. You just have to peer over the edge to see it.
