Out into the shadow

I returned to work yesterday. As in, during the day. On a week day. When people were there. Lots and lots of people. I tried to avoid people who knew, especially people who had been at the funeral or whom I'd been in regular communication with because maybe they would provide an unexpected touchstone and the bricks would fall out of my carefully constructed wall, and I would, you know, like break down crying in the hallway. I also tried to avoid people who did not know that the son I had loved for 13 of his 15 years had passed away. I mean, really. There is no way to explain this without crumbling a little, or perhaps a lot.

Which is sort of what happened when I was asked, "So, are you have a great summer?" The ground shook a little bit, but I was able to dig my toes through my flip flops and into the Berber carpet to steady myself as I responded something along the lines of, "Um, no, I'm having a horrible summer." In my head, I followed up that statement with something about it being the worst summer ever, and tried to position myself in a way that would allow me to catch the bricks and put them back without being obvious about it. When I pulled myself out of my head, I could see her looking at me with a quizzical expression. Had she seen me applying mortar? I had no words to offer her, but thankfully, someone else who was present interjected, "Her boy passed away." At least I think that's what she said. The floor started shaking again at the phrase, "her boy." I wanted to thank her for recognizing that he is my boy. I wanted to ask her if she understood the fullness of his being my boy, and not *just* a foster child that I had just met months ago when we were matched (again) for adoption. But I didn't. I'm not sure if she saw me crumbling or felt me crumbling, but she quickly redirected the conversation and led me to her office for the business at hand. Phwew. That was close!

But then as we were trying to schedule my work, I heard myself explaining that yeah, planning for mid-October might not work because I'm probably going to shut down for the beginning of October because Sekai's birthday is October 8, so maybe, uhm...and the tears welled up in my eyes. The floor was still, but I was shaking, bricks were falling, and I just knew the tears were next. "Stop!" I told myself. Out loud. She was much kinder to me than I was to myself in that moment, and brought it all to a close by saying quite simply, "so we'll schedule it for the end of October". Ok, yes, let's do that. The meeting came to a close, and I walked out quite happy with where things stood, thinking, hmm, maybe I won't go out of my way to avoid people who understand after all. And then I started sobbing in the stairway...but I pulled it together by the time I got to the bottom of the stairs.

Last night, I read these words on p. 95 of "Eat, Pray, Love" by Elizabeth Gilbert: "But what if by choice or by reluctant necessity, you end up not participating in this comforting cycle of family and continuity?...You'll need to find another purpose...Virginia Woolf wrote, 'Across the broad continent of a woman's life falls the shadow of a sword.' On one side of that sword, she said, there lies convention and tradition and order, where 'all is correct.' But on the other side of that sword...'all is confusion.'" Ms. Gilbert was writing about choosing not to have children, and though I have not read Ms. Woolf's work that Gilbert references, I imagine Woolf was also speaking of that choice. I made the choice to be a parent, though. I made the choice to have a family. This, this here, this standing in the shadow? This was not my choice.