full speed ahead
/I was stranded in Istanbul, Turkey for almost 3 days alone, and then for another 2 days in Cairo in 2017, during a year of political and social unrest in both countries. In Cairo, they tried to take my passport at the airport, would not allow me to pay for an excursion to see the pyramids for safety reasons because I was white and female, and in Istanbul I roamed the airport endlessly for 2 days straight without anyone to talk to and with very little WIFI ability to communicate with my support team.
At the time I was definitely not in my emotions, I was in survival mode. Once I finally got a hotel room in Istanbul for a night after waiting hours and hours for flight updates just to be cancelled across the board, I got inside my room, and immediately shoved the bench, two chairs and my suitcase against the door and stuffed one of the chairs underneath the door handle. I didn’t remember I did this until I was reliving my experience with a friend after I had gotten home. My final destination was Uganda for a humanitarian trip to support women and children in Amor Village with therapy and community art making.
There was an uncharacteristic “blizzard” in January 2017 in Turkey, although minor by most blizzard standards, it had basically caused the entire airport to shut down and left thousands of people stranded in the airport for a week, as the country was completely unprepared. I remember roaming the airport for hours because I couldn't sit long enough in one place before I had to get up and pee or get food, and would lose my spot to relax since I had no traveling companions with me to keep dibs. There was a huge window in one of the many wings of the long ass halls of the Istanbul airport that I’d pass a few times a day on my walks, and there was a parking lot outside this window. There, a group of cars left stranded, with one in particular that stood out to me… a cop car with it’s lights blinking on and on and on under the “blanket of snow”. The lights continued flashing until the day I finally hopped on a 1:00 am flight detour, one of the first flights to leave from the blizzard, a lucky strike I got to get out of there, to Cairo, then to Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and then finally to my destination of Uganda.
That was quite an adventure. I didn’t realize how scary it had been until retelling my story. How scary it was being alone in a sea of humans in Istanbul, and hailing taxis back and forth from my hotel on my own, how once we arrived in Cairo and they put me up in a hotel because my layover was longer than 4 hours and they don’t allow people to stay in the airport over 3 hours for safety reasons, how the shuttle to the hotel was bomb checked as we drove up to the gate, or when a group of men in the middle of the night screamed and yelled at us as the shuttle passed them on a highway exit street corner, or the government’s attempt to keep my passport at the airport until I continuously refused and told them I would pay for a visa, or realizing the gravity of the situation when the hotel concierge told me he wouldn't recommend booking an excursion to the pyramids in a calm and quivering tone he said to me, “It’s not safe ma’am. My recommendation is to not leave this hotel at all if you are traveling alone”, or the simple fact that I had traveled through 2 two different continents on my own and in countries where it was not safe for foreigners and much less women.
The point is, I didn’t realize the difficulty of the situation in the moment, because as I said I was just surviving. And I guess I never realized I could do something like that until after I did it. And that lesson is something that I’ve relearned this last year of shit in 2020. My capability as a human far outweighs the capability I think I possess. When we are called to action, when we are resilient and we don’t give up, we rise to the occasion. This experience, just like this year, has taught me gratitude, or moreso the ability to practice gratitude in the moment, and not just in hindsight. It’s easy for me now, to be thankful for the experience and the strength it has given me, and to look back on this year and be amazed and how we survived, but maybe in the moments I was frustrated or annoyed or I thought the thought that we all have sometimes, if one more thing goes wrong I’m gonna lose it, I’m not gonna make it, I’m gonna break down, I’m gonna explode… but then, one more thing does go wrong, and we don’t. We survive. “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms — to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” - Viktor Frankl
It’s like when you are in elementary/grade school and school starts getting harder or maybe you get some homework here and there and then you complain about it, or don’t like it and wish for no more. Then you get to middle school, and there’s homework every week and sometimes everyday and you say, ugh this is too much I can’t do it all, I have soccer twice a week too or student council meetings and projects (yes, I was a nerd) and I don’t have enough time to do it all. But you do. Then you get to highschool and your grades rely solely on yourself and your ability to keep up with the daily homework and accountability, and you are in sports or activities and have a social life, and you get up early for morning meetings and stay after school for basketball practice and you get home and scarf down dinner at 6:30, and then write your papers til bedtime, just to get up and do it all over again. And then it’s college, and all that time management and discipline taught you to succeed on your own and not only live alone but to be an adult, take 18 credit hours a semester to double major, write essays, thesis’, term papers, work a part time job, to find a job and life that suits you and your future…. and then you think to yourself while you’re sitting in the crowd at your college graduation, “ha, member when I thought middle school and soccer practice was hard?!”
In reflection, that’s how 2020 has felt for me. I’m in college, and a year ago I was in grade school. I never knew I could juggle all the things that I’m juggling until one ball dropped and I realized that that ONE ball used to be the ONLY ball I juggled, or I guess.. more like I just threw it up and down in the air. I once thought my experience being stranded alone was something weird and hard and kind of crazy I went through… today, I realize that it was/is NOTHING compared to being a stepmom, errr, a FULL-TIME wham-bam-thank you-ma’am-overnight parent- kind of stepmom… to kids who are dealing with their own very difficult and traumatic past, whose dad is gone for 48 hours every 4 days leaving me a single parent 35% of the time, a partner to a firefighter whose job requires him to sacrifice his life, and a trauma therapist running my own business. This is a real challenge, this is the real adventure.
So. Here I am, to shed some light into the world of our own capabilities and when those require us to ask for HELP, when we need to give ourselves compassion, when we need to accept the imperative loss that our relationships and time spent outside of our families will inevitably fall in line behind our more detrimental priorities, and when we need to practice gratitude for ourselves and our situations. And most importantly, here I am, to give props to STEPMOMS and the unheard and misunderstood lives that we lead. I FUCKING HEAR YOU.
Some days are hot shit chaos over here. That’s the god damn truth. BUT. Marek just fell asleep next to me after running both of his hands along the bends and curves and cracks of my face. It made me flashback, remembering being a small child and doing that to my mom when she would put me to bed. Maybe it’s the weird empath in us that makes us do such deep sensitive things that shake others to their core…. but, Marek gets me.
It was sleepover night in the big bed tonight. Dad’s gone and every once and awhile, the three of us cuddle in our bed and watch a movie together. They crave this time with me, and as much as I wanna tell them how asshole-y they are being each day, these nights fill me back up. These nights are small reminders that these tiny humans have learned to love me no different than a mom, that they need me no different than a mom, and that while I don’t replace their mom, I am a mom… the kind of mom that doesn’t have a playbook, the kind that doesn’t develop natural mom instincts because of biological connection, the kind that doesn’t really make sense because I didn’t get to see them grow from my body to real people, but the kind that just is. Instead of learned experience and organic momness, my connection to them is just empathic, I understand them and how to do this job on an unnatural but intuitive level.
Before Marek fell asleep he said, “See. Isn’t it better to have me to sleep with, than Dad??” I laughed as I placed my hand on his chest to feel his tiny heart beat like I do with Dave’s, at night. Then he said, “I really love you.”
I’m SaMOMtha… and nights like this remind me that they don’t need me to be anything else… or perfect, or to fit a mold and be a normal mom. Who’s normal anyway?
Taryn, our 11 year old, doesn’t give me moments of deep empathic messages like Marek does, but she doesn’t need to, her love is unwavering. She is hugging me, or nuzzling up against me or laying on me every chance that she gets and not a day goes by that she doesn’t remind me that I am hers, and her love for me is hard and big and brave and bold. She has this intense ability to separate, the way that she loves me is our own and isn’t her moms or her grandmas or her dads, or her loss’, it’s mine and hers and it’s its own entity. While it can be smothering to me at times because of my innate nature to self protect my bubble, and maybe because she is already taller than me, I know that her love is everything. She created this whole new space in her heart for me, and I am blown away by it everyday.
But still, despite the lack of problems surrounding the kids ability to love me and welcome me into this family, I am overwhelmed. Maybe it’s the overnight to momhood with no typical breaks like when the kids in split families usually go to their other parents house every few days, maybe it’s the single parent days when I’m taking care of two humans even though I’ve never done it before and I’m also running a business that requires most of my energy and love, maybe it’s the balance of those two things and trying to have some energy left over for those nights when it’s just the 3 of us and they need me more, maybe it’s the trauma that they’ve endured that shows up as unmanageable days of explosive emotions, anxiety attacks, nightmares, defiance and disrespect towards other adults, disruptive behaviors and off-the wall reactions, raging anger or paralyzing sobbing, maybe it’s missing Dave and the normal fears of his job and his sacrifice, maybe it’s COVID and the secondary effect the helpers are starting to feel- the burden, the heaviness, maybe it’s learning to manage not just my own family but two new ones, who I love so deeply but who all have their own dynamics and strengths and struggles and setting boundaries or getting boundaries broken, maybe it’s being a partner to a firefighter with its inherent difficulties- aloneness, fear, constant transition from 3 to 4 to 3 to 4, the juggling of children on your own, the inability to communicate and the discipline it takes to communicate well and be on the same page, the sadness mixed with huge pride, maybe it’s learning to be a mom in a house that there once was a mom with her own flaws and flows and patterns and imprints on the children that now I’m trying to raise, and maybe it’s the struggle of the stepmom that no one else but stepmoms can understand- especially not your partner who you need to understand more than anyone, and that you had no idea how hard it would be, that you need breaks that you don’t get more than any biological parent does because you didn't choose childbirth, that someone else’s prior life controls your current one, that you need help, as much as you make doing ALL the things look easy, its not, that you need extra love because of the reality of being a stepparent, that when you parent sometimes it feels like you are are forced to fit into someone else’s already established mold, that the entire world puts pressure on you and you are held at an extremely high standard and others are waiting to see you screw up, that you gave up your life to be there for your partner and his kids…
maybe its one of those things…. but … it’s definitely ALL of those things at once.
I don’t want to go back to soccer practice and occasional homework. I don’t want to quit. I don’t want to be given pity. We are killing it. The shit that we are juggling as a family right now its pretty insane. And I wouldn’t change it for the world. I’m staying in “college” and I don’t need to sit here and complain. I just need to remind myself when I’m overwhelmed or sitting in the negative that maybe it’s the kids’ trauma and my ability to understand that makes us whole, and maybe it’s the single parent days that have cultivated a fast track to the immense love they have for me, and maybe it’s Dave’s strange hours and my private practice being my own boss that allows us to have time for each other in the middle of the week and go on adventures with the kids whenever we want, maybe it’s the 2 new families I’ve inherited who have welcomed me and learned to love me just like our kids, and maybe it’s that in our pasts Dave hit his bottom and I’ve hit my bottom so now we can speak each other’s language, and maybe it’s our traumatic losses that bind us so strongly and passionately to each other, and that all those things make our weird family waffle sandwich fit together so perfectly... Our perfectly imperfect selves and lives and experiences are what have made the 4 of us a team.
So. I’m living the greatest challenge of my life. And it’s fucking hard and mindblowingly exhausting. And I love it. And thus, I am so very thankful for it.
And I’m thankful for the blizzard in Turkey,
And for my first marriage that gave me experiences and opportunity and bravery, and brought me to Colorado,
And for my shitty eating disorder and the strength of mind it gave me once I overcame it,
And the trauma that led me to self destruction because from those flames I eventually rose,
And for the resilience of our munchkins and what they are learning about the strength of mind and the heart,
And for the ability to sit with them in their pain,
And for the death in our lives that make us LIVE,
And for my Dave- he’s my otter, my dolphin- and his amazing mental fortitude because of the indescribable storm that he had to conquer,
And for the team we are building while juggling a thousand knives in the air, getting cut, learning when to let go, and learning when to brace ourselves in order to keep them afloat.
I am thankful for all this crap because all of them have led me here, and back to the lesson in this rambling… they led me to understand my capacity to juggle that I never knew I had. Our capacity as humans to KEEP GOING. I’m sure you all have experienced the struggle of 2020 and can relate to the moments of overwhelmingness I describe and that daunting juggling. But you are here, and you are alive, and you have survived. So let’s not be so quick to say FUCK YOU 2020….
Let’s say THANK YOU.
Listen to Full Speed by Mike Pinto. This is our self declared Team theme song because he sings about rising to his own potential and doesn’t look back at those people or things that tried to keep him down. It’s essentially our story, of survival, in a weird eccentric songwriting way.
And for the record…YES, we let our kids listen to songs with profanity in them. We are as real and honest as they come in our household, we’ve had to be… and we answer questions and concerns that, that honesty inevitability brings up. Maybe it’s being honest to a fault…and sure, you can judge us if you want to…. but the truth is, as my Firefighter would say… “with all due respect, I don’t really give a shit”.
:)