On Change, Evolution, and More Lake Magic

By Catherine DiMercurio

The more I write about journeys and transitions, about navigating them, the less I know. In my experience and from what I’ve observed, it’s as if we rarely get a chance to process one thing, when something else changes. I don’t know that this is a bad thing, but it is a thing to get used to, in the same way that we acclimate to the cold of the lake. I used to just run right in when I swam at the various inland lakes I used to live near. Now, being in close proximity to a Great Lake, I’m experiencing a different kind of cold. I used to think that by late August, the water temperature would generally feel warmer than it does at the beginning of the summer, and that is sometimes true. But there is nothing linear about the way lake water temperatures trend. I’ve learned about upwelling, where a wind shift pushes warmer waters near the shore back toward the middle of the lake, and brings up cold water from the lake depths. This can cause the water near the shore to drop by about twenty degrees. One day the water temperature could be 70 degrees Fahrenheit, the next barely 50.

So, you test the temperature, you wade in. Are your feet normal-cold or do your bones ache with it? I don’t acclimate as quickly as I used to, even in those warmer temperatures. Sixty-five to seventy degrees can still feel chilly for lots of people. I take it slowly. Somewhere between waist-deep and chest-deep, I dunk my head under, then swim in the unaccomplished, untrained way I do, staying where I can still touch the sandy bottom.

Lately, with all the transitions that continue to happen in my life and in the lives of those close to me, I’ve been thinking about the lake a lot, especially when I feel overwhelmed. I think about the way I float on my back, the way I’m able to move with the waves this way, the way the water sways me. I think about floating along with the changes that are happening, rather than trying to swim against them.

Photo by gu00f6ku00e7e erem on Pexels.com

It doesn’t always work. Sometimes the waves are too big. Sometimes you try to stand solidly and take the hit, keep your feet on the ground. There’s so much we cannot control when life is changing. Least of all the velocity of changes, the timing. Even when everything coming at us is a positive development, a series of open doors we’ve decided to step through, once we decide, everything takes on its own momentum and we must simply try to keep up.

I feel as though the only wisdom I’ve gained through any of this over the course of my life is that to acclimate to change, the best thing I can do is to keep shifting my perspective until I find the one that allows this particular transition to make sense. Eventually, with the right metaphor, I can find a way of looking at something that helps me to manage the change.

My hunch is that everyone is doing something similar when confronted with changes, good, bad, or otherwise. Because, you kind of have to. It seems that the only thing that you can predict accurately in life is that things will change, whether you want them to or not.

I try to see the beauty in it all, in the way people recalibrate their lives, their perspectives. Even when it’s messy, even in the struggle. I’m always especially impressed by my children. Watching the way they adapt to change, explore opportunity, embrace the new is inspiring. I often have the thought that I want to be just like them when I grow up. When I observe the way they handle things, I don’t see them the way I see myself: as a clumsy human navigating the lake by floating with the waves or trying to stand firmly against them. Rather, I’ve watched my children evolve, shift into whatever shape is most amenable to the situation, becoming a gull bobbing on the surface of the waves, a fish swimming deftly beneath the surface. They don’t resist, they efficiently grow into what each change requires. I wish I’d been able to learn that skill, that magic of being able to shift so effortlessly and beautifully into the next form. I don’t know that I ever had it; maybe I did once. Maybe I can learn it again.

It’s easy, after enough time, enough life, to forget that such magic ever existed. But witnessing it now, recognizing it, maybe that’s the first step to getting it back. Maybe my magic has always been different, though. Maybe I don’t adapt efficiently and elegantly and wholly. But I can find my own way to acclimate, find the metaphor that helps me see what to do next. Where others transform, I can watch and mimic, I can imagine myself a gull or a fish, even if I struggle to become whatever is next. Maybe that’s enough, for now, and if I remain imaginative enough and pliable enough, perhaps with enough lake magic I can keep moving from acclimatizing toward transforming, however slowly and inelegantly. We are all moving toward our next form, and we each accomplish it in our own way. Perhaps all we can do is be observant, be gentle, be open. I wonder sometimes if I am trying so hard to meet the moment, to evolve, to get it “right,” that I become my own obstacle. I am not the first person to get in my own way, to think that if I prepare and study in all the right ways, everything will fall into place. It’s as if in order to learn, we must unlearn so many things first. As if we spend so much time thinking about how to become a certain version of ourselves we lose our ability to become what was already on its way without any friction or intervention on our part. Maybe we can’t think our way toward our own evolution, we simply have to allow it.

Love, Cath

On the Dwindled Familiar

By Catherine DiMercurio

Sometimes you are out of step and looking for something familiar within yourself.

Lately and often, I’ve been considering the impact of erosion, the way events and transitions and life can lead to a dwindling of the sense of familiarity between ourselves and the world around us, and/or between ourselves and ourselves.

For most people in this chaotic, viral year, familiar routines and habits have evaporated. In the midst of it, as I’ve been writing about here, I’ve moved to a new home, and my son is preparing to leave for college, where he’ll join my daughter on campus, and I’ve been trying to acclimate to it all.

A couple of days ago, my son and I visited my daughter. She’s moved back in with her housemates and is also awaiting the new school year. The three of us walked through the collection of small buildings that form the dorm complex where my son will live. We drove to the river, watched the swans prune, the ducks play, and the geese eat and eat. After ordering some takeout bibimbop, we sat on my daughter’s porch, quietly devouring our spicy rice and vegetables and tofu. We talked about ways to be safe.

two person hold hands — Photo by NEOSiAM 2020 on Pexels.com

I sat on the porch swing, close to my daughter and I held her hand, as if she were my five-year-old once more, and I missed her suddenly and intensely now that we were together again. I listened to the two of them talk to one another about their class schedules, their futures.

It is not that I’ve been oblivious to how much of their life now unfolds without me in it on a regular basis, but sometimes it just hits you.

This part is over. Has been over, actually.

I was slow to realize.

With my daughter, even though she’s beginning her junior year and talking about what faraway things come next for her after she graduates, it still almost felt like I had time for everyday moments. Even though, despite a brief pandemic-induced period where she moved back home, I haven’t lived with her for some time. Maybe it is because my son is about to leave too that the truth of it all is clarifying for me. Whatever privileged status I may hold in their lives as their mother will not necessarily translate into daily relevance.

At home, at this home-in-the-making, I walk through the house in the morning, letting the dog out, making the coffee, making the bed, and none of it has quite coalesced as familiar. Sometimes, I only feel as at home here as I would in any place where I like the décor. Those books. That pottery vase. The pink tile in the bathroom. The way the light moves through the house throughout the day is pleasing. And we have begun building memories here, a birthday, morning coffee on the back porch, a wide sweep of conversation. Tears and laughter, sleep and restlessness. Meals prepared and eaten together. At the same time, the notion of familiarity can feel elusive.

I am only slowly realizing that familiar does not always have to do with what the things I thought it did – time, memory, history, objects.

I have new possessions and old ones here in this new place, but the old things have the same hum as the new, though I know them better. Possibly I’m confusing the notion of familiarity with something else.

And then suddenly sometimes it all shifts into place with a soft sigh. I am not always half a step off from the general flow of things, but with all the churn and shove of these transitions, I can be a beat behind. I’m noticing too that people notice what I haven’t, like how long I pause sometimes before I’m able to catch up. I tried explaining this recently to my son but I don’t think I was able to make much sense of it.

At times, I feel at once melancholy and joyous, as if both of these are simultaneously my natural states, and I am perpetually tugged in one direction or the other, and the unease I feel within my own skin sometimes is a side effect of the journey from one state to the other.

This is all to say that sometimes our world and the miniscule and the enormous upheavals therein cause us to feel unfamiliar to ourselves, as we try to respond to all the things we need to. Sometimes we try and fail. Sometimes we try and are slow to realize that we aren’t failing. We are in a state of trying. We are earnest. We are tugged between versions of ourselves. We are tugged in and out of the flow that everyone else seems to keep pace with.

Perhaps the most centering power, the thing that consistently brings me back to myself, is the act of looking into the eyes of those people I love, and being recognized. The warm brown eyes of my son, kind and astute, grounded and curious. My daughter’s sea gaze, all grey and green, passion and power and depth. The blue sky eyes of my love, a soar of melody and truth, wisdom and sweetness.

We are all moving through our own states, and sometimes we are trying to catch up to ourselves and to each other and to the world. We owe ourselves and each other recognition and respect, patience and compassion.

Love, Cath

On Mothering and Metabolism

By Catherine DiMercurio

I circled around this blank page for a while, looking for a place to land. The week percolated with activity and emotion and I found myself trying to keep up and keep catching my breath. It was like tripping and falling. There’s a slow motion moment where it feels like you should be able to stop the tumbling but the momentum already has a grip.

This week began (or last week ended) with Mother’s Day. I spent a quiet morning with my children, then traveled an hour and a half north to visit with my mother, father, and a handful of sisters.

In the days that followed, I dealt with the irritation of a broken dryer and the frustration that comes with rearranging my work schedule to accommodate a repair, which, incidentally remains incomplete. The dryer is 19 years old. Parts were ordered. And now we wait.

That night, my daughter had an away soccer game. It was one of the only games this season that I did not attend. Luckily her father was there, because my daughter had a severe allergic reaction that landed her in the emergency room. I met them at the urgent care clinic where he had taken her, and where she passed out, and where EMS was arriving. She was only out for a moment, and they were assessing her vitals. Everything was stabilizing, the two doses of Benadryl—one administered by her father and one, intravenously, by the EMT—had taken care of her hives, and her throat was no longer feeling tight. She did not need epinephrine. At the hospital, we were joined by her boyfriend and his mother. We circled my daughter’s bed, waiting for her to be seen. After about 3 hours, the attending physician reviewed her chart and told us to follow up with her doctor and an allergist. (Obviously!) There were no answers, which I didn’t really expect. Many things could have triggered the hives. The passing out, within the realm of everything that was happening to her body, was not a concern to the attending, but certainly something to keep an eye on. We returned home, exhausted and perplexed.

beach black and white dramatic horizon — Photo by Pok Rie on Pexels.com

This day tumbled into the next—a promotion at work, a vet visit, prom again (my daughter and her boyfriend had already attended her school’s prom, and now they were off to his), and my son preparing for his first job interview. His sixteenth birthday is next week.

Exhausted and perplexed, I suppose, are the emotions that linger after this week of highs and lows, some of which I found I could not yet wrap words around, as they are still percolating in their raw and formless way, waiting for me. I find myself struggling to take it all in and comprehend it. I’ve been using the word “metabolize” frequently lately in this context, feeling as though life is often comprised of ingesting this array of experience and emotion. Metabolizing it all consists of gleaning what wisdom and knowledge I can, and crying or laughing the rest of it away, to make room for the next round. This week has been full of lessons. I became aware, for instance, that learning what it means to let other people in to the lives of my children is not something that happens all by itself, quietly, in the background. It is something I became aware of as the week unfolded and was at times overwhelming, though inherently and wonderfully positive. Good things take time to be metabolized too, not just the tough stuff. I chew on things. I process slowly. I think a lot, some say overthink, but it’s more that I’m turning it all over in my mind, looking at all the subtle contours, thinking about it all the same way lake water and sediment erode and soften beach glass or stone.

I’m still making sense of things this week, so I’m going to do something different right now and leave you with this, a poem I drafted not too long ago while I was getting my MFA, and which I’ve pulled out recently to reexamine and revise. I’ll be taking a couple of weeks off after this post. I’m in the middle of novel revisions again, trying to polish and tighten in time to submit, by the end of the month, to a contest for “older published writers of fiction.” I hope you enjoy the poem. It’s about mothering, which seems appropriate in the context of this week and this post.

Mine

The moon tugs oceans of grief.

In the wet sand in-between place, I can begin to see what’s mine.

What isn’t.

In between history and anguish, my failures imprint themselves.

When I say this is my daughter,

What I mean is that she is the one who tore through me once.

But to use the possessive to describe this feral female, all rage and rangy and tangled but who still lopes near, as if to the porch for a saucer of milk and a scratch, well, that doesn’t make her mine.

When I say this is my son,

All I mean is that he is the one who slipped almost quietly into this world, from my world, quietly once in the early morning, too early, shallow breathing fish out of water boy.

But to use the possessive when describing this wild hidden one who stays close but not too close, like a secret thing whisper-peering out from behind a red milk crate left out back by the strawberry patch, well, that doesn’t make him mine.

Watching these two brooding ones ruminate on the way things broke, I don’t think they use the possessive either. I’m not theirs. I’m it.

The one who saw the fissures in the world and couldn’t stitch and mend fast enough or in the right places

Or the gaps were too big

Or the stuffing shook loose anyway.

Still I made sure there were porch and milk and crate and strawberries.

Still I broke apart

Still I found the feral and the fierce and the stillness.

Still I grasped us back to safety.

Nothing makes them mine.

But when they trot in through the back door I always leave open

They snuggle me in a big heap on the floor and we get to belong to each other at least

for a moment, a breath, and one more.

Please.

Love, Cath