Messy No More

When I got home from work at the bookkeeping gig today, a well of anxiety emerged in my chest. My room was a mess, clothing balled up on the floor, stacks of unsorted papers beginning to accumulate on the desk I just cleaned two weeks before. The kitchen was a disaster, dishes and pots caked with two dinners' worth of food, crumbs moistened with oils and cooking juices pasted into the cutting board on the counter. I breathed in, and breathed out. I had to return a couple client phone calls, and for a moment doubted my ability to do any therapeutic good for them. And then I remembered: I am not a mess, and my life is not a mess. I am well-loved, and loving, and make time for my emotional well-being and the well-being of the people I care about and the people I serve in therapy. My space can be untidy, and it doesn't mean that I myself am messy or unclean or a disaster. And being "unclean," y'know, is sometimes a good thing, indeed.
The new year has brought me some much-needed perspective and a refocusing of goals. Not really a formal list of resolutions, but an acknowledgement that I have what I need to continue making a good life for myself, and contributing to the lives of the people I love. My mom and I had a heart-to-heart while we spent the weekend with the family at the annual retreat and hootenanny. She told me in no uncertain terms that I'm doing a crappy job keeping in touch with her, and we both cried our way through this painful but ultimately very important conversation. I've been a little irritated with her lately, because she often puts the guilt on thick about this sort of thing, but this time she was really sharing the feelings beneath that, and I knew I had to take it in. The subtext for me was, "I'm 72 years old, a lifelong smoker, and my parents were both dead by age 82. We've got ten more years together at best, kid. Step it up." And so I am stepping it up, and not just with Mom, but hopefully with my sisters, and my nieces and nephews, and my dearest friends who haven't seen enough of me the last couple years.

I'm broke, since I'm only working three days a week while I continue the internship at the clinic, but with the generosity of my girlfriend, also not rich by any stretch, we'll both survive it. We'll survive it, and then, soon, with some hard work and with some luck, I'll begin to build my therapy practice. I'm excited. I just received my official MFTI # in the mail a few days ago: I'm now a registered Marriage and Family Therapy Intern in the state of California. One step at a time.

Lastly, but not leastly, I got a message on Facebook from Bianca. Yep, that Bianca. And it was, to my delight, a completely respectful, authentically friendly message. Upon reading it, I was shocked, but warmly, and then I tapped into my anger about our last couple of interactions, and then into my deep, deep grief. I held Astrid in my arms that night at bedtime and cried for all the love lost in my life. The love that felt, in that moment, to be bereft of joy and stinking of pain. Astrid helped me to collect myself, and after a few days of feeling melancholy, I figured out how to respond to the message. It turned out to be the most genial exchange Bianca and I had had in probably ten years.

Life is good. And so's love. Happy New Year, everybody.


*Thanks to RJ for the petunia.