Carrie Link

FALLING WITH BEAUTY


Are you guys sick of Dar Williams yet? You're not? Good!! Me neither! No more lyrics, though, I'm just going to write about one line of one song. Dar, and I like to call her "Dar," sings, "The beauty of the rain is how it falls," from the song, "The Beauty of the Rain."

I've got my cheapie Target disk player running this song on "repeat," my ears cushioned by the soft pads on the earphones. The water fountain outside the window playing soothing background music. It's raining on my porch, it's raining in my ears. It's raining from my eyes. Soft, cleansing rain meets all my senses and I let it. I do not put up a fuss. I do not stop the flow. I watch the rain fall, and marvel at its great, great beauty and restorative qualities.

I've realized as I've been listening to those words, that that is exactly what I've been trying to do all these weeks alone in Sisters. I'm trying to fall with beauty. I've been tipsy for a long time, but not wanting to cause any undo mess and confusion for anyone else, I've held off on the full falling apart until I could do so with as little global impact as possible. You can take the raging alcoholic parent out of the daughter's life, but you can't take the daughter out of the shadows/deep conditioning. Isn't that how the old saying goes? I learned a long time ago where (far, far away) and when (never) it was appropriate to let yourself come undone.

I fell once as a child. That didn't work out so well. Fell apart again on the brink of adulthood, another disaster. Fell a third time as an adult, wife, mother. That last fall found me in an ER with a stretcher on my back, and a prescription for anti-anxiety meds in my purse.

I've been critcal of other women and the way they "fall." Don't care much for the extra-marital affair option. Don't care much for the plastic surgery. Don't care for those routes, but totally, totally understand them now. There comes a point when the old life doesn't fit anymore and you're not going to wear it! Remember that old bra commercial? Kinda like that, but a whole lot messier, usually. I, personally, have never liked things to be messy. Call me a neat freak, but I prefer to do my mess making in private. I'm like an animal when they know they are going to die. They crawl off alone somewhere and take care of that natural process on their own terms.

In hindsight, if I'm brutally honest with myself, though, I've known this fall was coming for a long time, and I've been gentling the ground ever since. I see that now, with the rain all around me, what I couldn't see in the confusion of the clear, blue sky of my beautiful life.

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My mom moved out of this home here in Sisters five years ago, after living in it, alone, for 13 years. Over the last five years I've slowly, but surely, made the house more "mine" and less "hers." Only last week I took the last of her food from the cupboards, last dishes, last paintings off the wall and last coat from the closet. The plan was she would come back often and see her friends here, so when she moved to Portland, she only sort of moved. The Sisters house remained fully functioning.

While the house maintanied its full functioning abiltiy, I slowly lost mine. There was a deep unrest in me. I had everything a girl could want. I had a beautiful loving husband, beautiful loving children, a beautiful home, beautiful friends, loving extended family. If I couldn't be happy with this, what the hell was wrong with me? Life doesn't get any better than this, right?

While it's so cliche I hesitate to say it, it remains true, what I didn't have was a sense of "self." Who was I? I was "wife," "mother," "daughter," etc., but I didn't know who I was without those labels. If you'd asked me, "Who is Carrie and what does she want?" my answers would have all been in relation to my relations. If you took those labels off of me I was naked and speechless.

As I sit with this rain in my ears and eyes, I realize the biggest part of this re-claiming process is behind me, I can see the end. I can see myself going back "home." Home to Portland. Home to the beauty of my life there. Home to the beauty of myself.

A friend sent me this quote from Sue Monk Kidd's book, When the Heart Waits, "I stood at the window watching the cocoon, which hung in the winter air like an upside–down question mark. That was the moment... I understood. Really understood. Crisis, change, all the myriad upheavals that blister the spirit and leave us groping– they aren't voices simply of pain but also of creativity. And if we would only listen, we might hear such times beckoning us to a season of waiting, to the place of fertile emptiness."

Fertile emptiness. Yes. That is is exactly. I am so blessed for the time and place to feel this fertile emptiness. For only when you've felt the emptiness, can the re-filling process begin. This re-filling process will be slow and steady, though, not my usual way at all. What goes back in will hold little resemblance to what was taken out. All that was "true," never left and is in no danger now. What was "false," though? That went out and will stay out. At least that is my intention.