I can feel all the emotions bubbling in my body. Stomach cramps and irritability due to overstimulation. Makes me want to move fast but what I know I need to do is slow down. Yesterday I felt like I was going to vomit and cry all at the same time. Today I need to set boundaries around it all and give myself the time and space to grieve. So many losses all occurring at the same time as new life is popping its head up. Just hold on there new life! I need a minute to breathe.
We said goodbye to a woman who we are going to miss dearly. My daughter’s daycare provider who she has been with since the day after she turned one years old. She is still alive! We are just moving onto the next phase of life, Transitional Kindergarten!
It has been three years and 6 months that I have been dropping my child off at her provider’s home. Entrusting the full safety and wellbeing of my most precious human to another. And she did an amazing job.
There were plenty of moments along the way when my anxiety spiked in absurd ways like believing my child was dying when her provider messaged me to let me know she fell asleep on the floor in the middle of playing, this being due to a vaccine she had gotten two days prior. Needless to say she was fine…
Or being OCD about my kids hair (which is curly) and the inevitable matting that would happen throughout the day and during nap time. Her daycare lady took in my anxious requests for her to brush her hair once a day to detangle the knots in an attempt for me to sooth my anxiety. Anxiety created by unconscious intrusive thoughts that were being driven by an underlying fear that I was in some way doing wrong by my child. That I was not meeting her core needs in my own need of having to work and leave her with a complete stranger for 9 hours a day.
My kiddo is half black and my obsession around tending to her hair was an expression of my own anxiousness of tending to her blackness as a single white mother. I feared I wasn’t doing enough. That I was neglecting a very important part of who she is. A part I myself do not carry but had become responsible to do so in the absence of her father and any black community around us, including at her daycare. Thankfully I was able to work through my neurosis and find my truth in the fact that I was doing what was best for my kid and so was her daycare lady. That we both as white women deeply honored her blackness and the importance of not tending to the hair but to her as a child. Even after my anxiety was resolved our daycare lady continued to brush out her hair after naps, even on days when I dropped her off looking like a hot mess of a crazy morning haha.
This transition and all of the emotions it has created in me has stirred reflections on the experiences of those parents and their children that I have served. In my role as therapist I too become rather emotional at the end of treatment. I have shared about the lessons I have gained in this in prior posts. These last two days, however, I have been identifying very much so with the parents. Being in the place of immense gratitude for an individual that has honored my child and myself as her mother. It is so important that people be allowed to express and process this gratitude and the grief that comes with losing someone that has played such an important role in their child’s life as well as their own.
I always reciprocate this gratitude right back to my client’s parents, who in all reality are also my clients. Thanking them for trusting me with their child. For trusting that I will do right by their kiddo who often came to me in a vulnerable and fragile state. I cannot express how much I honor and protect this space. How sacred it is to me and how acutely aware I am of the power that I hold within it to create an impact, including a negative one.
As I sink deeper into the pool of emotions within me I begin to explore an unfamiliar one. It is not grief, nor gratitude, but relief. As I name and embrace this emotion it consumes me. Flooding me with tears that deepen this sensation of release, the kind that brings oxygen back into my lungs. I have this sudden and intense awareness that we have made it. That we have survived. That me and my little have come out of the thick and often rather dark forest that has been our life since she was in my womb.
I am noticing this strange awareness that we are going to be okay. That we have overcome a very specific journey that we will never again have to venture through. I have learned the lessons. Gained the wisdom. Integrated the strength and resources. And now rest in the confidence that I got this shit. I have this motherhood thing. I no longer hold fear in making hard choices when it comes to my kid. I have accepted that this process is full of big feelings and uncomfortable transitions that become the force that moves us forward. A process that binds us closer as we grow farther apart.
I stand next to her, hand in hand, facing the sun and looking to the horizon for all the good that is coming. Because I do in fact believe in the good things coming.