Last week was really terrible. My response to almost every situation was tears. I was miserable. One day, I went for a walk alone to the library and passed a house that had been decorated for Mardi Gras. Mardi Gras! The green, yellow, and purple decorations were festive and beautiful. Seeing it made me happy.
Over the weekend, things got better gradually. On Sunday night, I went out and bought supplies for Carnival masks. I thought to myself, that was it. I’m over (or through?) the pandemic wall. I’ve done enough grieving about not traveling this year. There’s no school this week. Things are going to be great. I’ll make a short to-do list and be kind to myself about it. I’ll be less stressed because I won’t be doing school with the kids in addition to feeding, supervising, and managing my household. Maybe I’ll want to craft again!
Today, the daily devotional we read during home school included poem about presenting a positive demeanor to the world and not bogging people down with our personal woes and health concerns. Tell God how good you feel, and God will make it so, was essentially the closing prayer.
This afternoon, after a week-plus break from social media, I hopped back on IG. One of the first posts in my neglected feed was a slideshow about white people’s toxic tendency of pretending everything is OK all the time. According to the infographic, this prevents Black people from being open about their reality and makes it hard for them to trust white people or feel safe around them. White privilege allows us – encourages us? – to pretend things are OK even when they aren’t.
Today is a day of mourning for Native Americans. It has been so for fifty years. As our country awakens again to the tragedies that have dogged us at every stage of our history, it’s difficult to find a holiday that can be celebrated without mixed feelings.
Truthfully, what holiday was ever free of baggage? These days were already burdened with the small and large issues we have with them, wrapped up in financial woes, boundaries with family members, or our own dark personal struggles.
If you go back to my very first blog post, I talked about the pressure of trying to make all the holiday magic by myself. In the couple of years since then, I’ve realized that I don’t have to do it alone.
After yesterday’s post I felt like I had to follow up because today was so different from the past several weeks.
I woke up this morning and had finished molting.
One of the ways I stay anchored is verbal processing.
I don’t like that I need to talk through things out loud with another human in order to figure out how I feel or what I think.
I’d like to be self sufficient, but there are times that everything just builds up inside in a huge murky morass until I relent and the Chaplain submits to the maelstrom.
