The Spark and the Fuel

I wrote this two weeks ago now. While pondering the time to post, I received the NPR notification of RBG’s passing and I wept as I cooked dinner. I needed to take a pause to respect and mourn her, as the world did. And my little life’s trials, tribulations and occasional meltdowns suddenly seemed so insignificant. But I will continue to share my journey in my 50s, so here is my latest looking back and moving forward moment of reflection.

The Spark and the Fuel

I watch, listen, and read the news about the destructive wildfires out west, wishing that 2020 was finished presenting fear and loss, and the images leave me stunned. Countless acres and homes reduced to ash, the gray darkness at mid-day in Portland, the amber glowing sky over San Francisco. I hear the sheer terror in a man’s voice as he describes to a reporter how California is burning. “Do they see this?” he screams.

While there are many causes, it’s shocking to know that one of the fires, the El Dorado, started with an innocent spark. A celebration even – something called a “gender reveal party.” Apparently, these events (which I had never heard of before, showing my age!) replace the traditional baby shower and include a dramatic moment to cleverly expose whether the expected child is a boy or girl. This particular party used some type of firecracker to display blue or pink smoke while family and friends watched in anticipation. Clearly the ensuing drama was more than they intended.

I can’t understand anything about this Instagram-worthy ritual. I prefer to remember the simple oohing and aahing as I opened the cutest gender-neutral onesies, sweet white booties and multi-colored baby blankets given to me before my first child’s arrival. We saved the drama for the delivery room. But what I do understand is how an innocent spark can become something bigger than it was ever meant to be. “Fires happen when ignition meets available fuel” I read. That’s all it takes – something to ignite and available fuel to make the fire spread and grow.

That happened to me. An innocent spark thrower ignited my locked-up baggage of fuel. It was just a sweet moment, but it couldn’t be put out in my mind. I wish it were like the brief burn of a matchstick, but instead it was a slow-moving heat that I couldn’t understand. It attached itself to other things that were more significant than the charge itself, and like every one of the 300 fires raging in California, Oregon and Washington right now, it was the underlying conditions that made it grow.

Here’s what I know now about my underlying conditions at the age of 50. While unaware that I had enough anger hidden inside me to feed a wildfire, I was very familiar with another kind of heat. Yes, my natural cycle had aged, slowly faded away, and hot flashes took its place. You have to laugh at the extent to which they can consume you, because otherwise you’ll just be mad – angry mad on top of crazy mad (yes, they make you crazy). Your family and friends will giggle along with you when you can no longer hide the sweat that is dripping down your body as the heat travels up your neck and face to make your cheeks so flush you look like you came in from a run, but you’re just trying to enjoy a meal. Add wine to your meal and watch out! Try vodka (well, the experts will tell you to avoid alcohol all together but…). Your husband may tire, sympathetically, of hearing that you barely slept once again; your sheets so wet at one point in the night your bed reminds you of a damp tent on a childhood camping trip when finding a comfortable temperature between hot and cold eludes you. You try to remember to bring your water bottle to every work meeting, the kind that keeps that water cold for 8 hours, so that when you feel the heat wave rising you hope it isn’t obvious that your shirt is sticking to your skin as you take a sip for distraction. You pray it doesn’t happen when you stand in front of the room trying to get the decision makers to pay attention to your PowerPoint deck instead of the fact that you suddenly need to take off your jacket. No turtlenecks, ladies. Put them away. Cardigans. Sleeveless shirts under lightweight jackets and cardigans – that’s the work wardrobe you need no matter the season.

A few other compounding factors were playing a role in my life. My husband had his mid-life crisis (he prefers to label it a mid-career crisis) some years before, and we decided to give his passion business idea a go. The stress of a brick and mortar start up is risky under any circumstances, and things went wrong. While I believed in it with all of my heart, and even my brilliant spreadsheet predicted it could work, I supported it too much. Don’t get me wrong, I loved being part of building something from scratch, and he gives me all the credit I deserve. We fought hard to reach success, fought hard with each other too, and the struggle took its toll. My return to corporate America to provide the family with financial stability and healthcare was exciting and satisfying for a few years but eventually reached a point where the stress outweighed the benefits. My efforts to keep some semblance of family dinners with two kids springing into adolescence exhausted me and grounded me back to life’s simple pleasures at the same time, while my husband worked 80-hour weeks during those first years. Creating something together brought us closer too, but only after we began to see the light at the end of the tunnel.

So, as I found my feet firmly planted in mid-life, trying to balance it all, embracing the challenges, and starting to feel some stability after the changes we made, another condition kicked in. Anxiety seems to latch itself to those damn hormones telling you your time being the woman you once knew is up. Before I turned 50, I had experienced plenty of life’s usual stressors, but I never really understood the difference between stress and anxiety. Anxiety kept my brain buzzing at night. One little bee of a thought would become a loud nest with no explanation of why I couldn’t just relax into the buzz. There is a “bee breath” in yoga that is supposed to reduce anxiety and even lower your blood pressure. It never worked for me when the hornets swarmed at night. I guess I needed more practice.

Then one day, my unintended spark thrower met my fuel. In a state overwhelmed with anxiety and confusion, I said the wrong thing to the very wrong person. Maybe even bigger than that, I hadn’t shared my struggle with my husband because I didn’t know what was wrong with me. My life, at least the one inside my head, had slowly filled with fear and doubt. There was anger in there too, but until the aftermath of my mistake I never knew how deeply I tucked it away. My husband’s face was stunned with hurt and incomprehension as I tried to explain my behavior. My regret felt like pulling a canoe upstream; I thought the force of the current might never let me move forward. At the same time, another part of me could stand strong and present a simple defense of my moment of meltdown – I had a bad day, used bad judgement, I was confused, stressful things were happening, I did too much, I didn’t understand myself anymore and didn’t know what I needed.

I wished it could have been simple, but there was sadness and loss left in the path of my rage. Nothing was going to make sense until we did the work we needed to do, and the work is hard. I needed my husband’s attention. Our marriage needed to find its way back to balance. We hadn’t realized that we missed the natural cycle of renewal that breaks down the old stuff that gets in the way and returns nutrients to the soil. It took me a long time to forgive myself for causing suffering and avertable drama, but the fire needed to burn. Somewhere in the process my husband not only forgave me, but finally understood more of me. I understood more of him too. The work is worth it.

“You were doing double duty. You can’t do that forever,” my therapist once said, doing his job to validate while I struggled to understand my own feelings. I think the trees in those forests in California and Oregon and Washington have been doing double duty for too long. Trying too hard to take in carbon dioxide and release it back as oxygen while not having enough water to give the cycle its natural ease.

Today, in place of night sweats, my body typically warms me out of sleep around 5:30 am. I wish it were an hour later, but I’ll take it. As the season begins to change outside, we relax in our empty nest inside and enjoy the warm glow of our wood burning stove, together. There will be more moments when sparks will fly, and the uncertainty of these times for us and the world sure make for some challenging underlying conditions. For now, I cry for the people who have lost so much in those vicious fires. The world needs our attention.