This morning, when Keith reached over and turned on the lamp, this inexplicable feeling of loneliness just washed over me.
I stood there, leaning against the foot of the bed, trying to process the flood of emotion. It was as though a pop up book had been flung open, and a blur of images and sensations flickered past inside me.
Every day I have to try and manage my emotions of sorrow, anxiety, fear, longing, and grief that surround this adoption process, and everything else that is happening in our life.
Every lonely, anxious memory is evoked and then surpassed by this experience. I feel as I did waking to the dark for the long drive to the airport, and the whir of the baggage wheels, the glowing signs, the bleary faced strangers.
I feel as I did on dreary school mornings, anxiety weighing down all my limbs, pulling on my worn, second hand clothes in the dim light, knowing my homework wasn't done right, that I wasn't right, that if I was lucky, I would make it through the day unnoticed.
I feel tears well up into my eyes at the most random commercials, at movie trailers. Each time I push them down, mercilessly. I won't cry; I won't.
I'm cruel to myself. I've always been that way, even in my childhood diaries. There are entries where I made fun of something I had written earlier, in a sarcastic, biting way.
I know what it is. I know why I won't let myself feel, why I have cut myself off from that. It's a powerful self defense mechanism; it's a learned trait at least three generations old.
My father put this quote on his facebook wall:
"The wound in the place where the light enters you."
-Rumi
And someone pointed out that even so, it hurts.
It does hurt.
It's easy to talk about suffering in a theoretical sort of way. I like talking about it in a theoretical way.
But it hurts.
It helps when I remember that God carries the same wounds; that He walked right into the heart of His suffering. He didn't medicate it or avoid it. He gave voice to His emotion.
