Ice, Elevators, and Newt Gingrich

It is January and we’ve had a fair amount of snow and cold in Colorado this winter. I’m of the opinion that if it is going to be winter, it might as well be cold and snowy, but our house faces north and inevitably, every winter, a gigantic ice patch forms in front of it. Sometimes it melts off rather quickly. Sometimes it hangs around for the better part of winter. This seems to be a year when it plans to hang around. No amount of shoveling, chipping, pick-axing, or salt can prevent the glacial formation. While I don’t love the ridiculous, unending, painful work of trying to remove the ice, what I like even less is trying to walk across it. I resemble a zombie every time I lurch across the ice with little jerks and convulsions. I’m a klutz and have horrible balance.

So horrible that I couldn’t ride a bike until I was 12 or something. Balance beams terrified me as a child. Roller skates? Forget it. To this day, I still have trouble riding an escalator. Really. I can’t quite coordinate that whole moving stairs, one foot at a time thing. On the whole, I’ve learned to live with my lack of physical balance. But sometimes it feels as though my emotional balance matches my physical balance and I start lurching through life with little jerks and convulsions. I definitely haven’t learned to live with that.

I’ve been working on writing my doctoral dissertation for what feels like most of my adult life now. Obstacles keep getting thrown in my path. Sometimes they are unforeseeable and out of my control, like when my mom was ill last summer and I spent the better part of it in the hospital with her. Or even the months leading up to moving her to Colorado, when I was finding her a place to live and preparing myself emotionally for her arrival. Sometimes the obstacles are of my own making, like when I sit down and cry and tell myself, “I can’t do this!” During those episodes I end up wasting inordinate amounts of time in emotional angst. And then my inner judge walks in all hostile and haughty and starts chastising me (funny how that judge looks an awful lot like my mother). It can get ugly.

For some weird reason, if I’m not careful, I can get caught up in the notion that I have to make it seem as though everything is breezy even if it isn’t. As though I can handle my mother and the dissertation and my family and my friendships and everything else that comes my way without being ruffled. I can’t. And really, aside from my own pride, there simply isn’t any reason I should feel I have to.

Being my mother’s nearest care-giving offspring adds a decidedly challenging spice to life. Her autumn rally appears to be wearing off and when that happens I know what is coming. I feel like I’m playing ‘Beat the Clock’ to finish the dissertation before she plunges. Some days I’m paralyzed by the fear I can’t do it all. When that happens I try to walk my emotional balance beam but start feeling like I did back in 5th grade PE when everyone else was prancing across the beam with dainty graceful steps and I would take one step, teeter, shriek, and fling off the side.

I am doing the best I know how. And for the rest of the world, that seems to be plenty. For whatever reason, my brain can get really crowded with the inept 5th grader, the judge, and that crazy bitch who thinks she has to make it all look so easy. Sometimes the clamor is so loud I can’t even make out who is saying what.

Recently I told my brother that I had been praying for more challenging people in my life to help me learn grace. While I lack physical grace I'm hoping to develop more emotional grace. He, rightfully, thought that was a little nutty and recited for me all the challenging people and situations I’m currently juggling. He lovingly offered advice regarding my prayer life by suggesting that if I needed to pray about something, I pray to win the lottery. Or, if I really needed to pray more altruistically…I could pray that Newt Gingrich is rendered mute.

He made me laugh. He calmed me down. And he reminded me that who I am and what I’m doing is plenty. He offered me what I most need to offer myself. What we all need to offer ourselves.

Grace.