Red-Eyes and Resting

I’m currently travelling back to my hometown for my best friend’s baby shower, after a red eye and a long layover and airport food and whew. This is the first big thing I’ve done since my surgery, exactly one month ago today. And what a month. I am a person who deeply believes in the importance of rest, and still, when faced with week after week of exhaustion, I found myself struggling much more than I ever thought I would.

I do my best to divorce my self-worth from my productivity because I truly believe that we are not merely the sum of what we do. But what I didn’t realize was how hard it is to keep believing in rest when it’s disruptive to so many of the everyday routines that make our lives work. It’s so hard to feel like an inconvenience, like I’m adding one more thing to Forrest’s already overloaded plate, like my girls are wanting and needing something that I simply do not have the energy to give them.

I’ll admit, I was irritable. My frustration at not being able to do more bubbled over more than once, and more than once, my family gently reminded me that while they knew I was struggling, could I please be slightly less abrasive? I don’t want to paint a picture of some beatific person who sat there reading books and smiling weakly at her children – no, I was grumpy and mostly played Candy Crush and watched stupid TV.

But as I’m getting my strength back, mostly, I’ve been overwhelmed with gratitude. Gratitude for Forrest, of course, who takes most setbacks in stride and never seems to get tired of caring for us all. Gratitude for my friends, who reached out and helped keep me connected to the world outside. And mostly, gratitude for my girls, who have grown enough to be able to create the Christmas magic I simply could not.

These past few years have been full of grief for a lot of us. And I’m not sure that that’s a bad thing. There’s a power in grief – in fully owning the losses and giving up the idea that we can control them or fully prevent them. I don’t know that I’ve accepted that I don’t want a life without loss. I feel as though I am no longer simply grieving people I’ve lost, but the time that has not lived up to what I once believed it would be. The years of my kids’ childhood that were spent in a sort of half-life. The months of fear and exhaustion as we tried to claw back some semblance of normality even before the girls were vaccinated. And now, completely unrelated, these weeks of illness and pain.

I don’t always know how to balance that gratitude and grief. Because, to me, they are two sides of the same coin. Both are expressions of profound investment in life, the one wild and precious life that I get. As I age, I find myself shedding the layers of cynicism and anxiety and sophistication that kept me from being fully immersed in this living. But that’s hard, so hard, too. There’s a reason we hold onto that cynicism – real life, fully lived can burn like flame, can’t it? Even the gratitude is bittersweet, tinged with fear of loss or understanding that even the good things in our life will one day fade or change.

This probably isn’t the uplifting new year’s post that I should be writing. Maybe it’s the red-eye flight talking. But I’m determined that this year is going to be a good one – and that actually means one where I don’t shy away from the gratitude or the grief, where I am thankful even for the sick days and forced rest. Even if I am a little irritable about it from time to time.