Stuck, Unstuck

It was January—that moment when, in Michigan, you are still descending into the depths of winter. (Never mind that the days are getting longer, lighter.)

I was continuing to descend, too. My descent was more deceptive than winter’s—a postpartum swirl of hormones and emotions that could just as easily trick me into believing I was rising as falling. There were moments of brilliant sunshine on fresh blankets of snow, joyful baby squeals, and the sense that I had never quite been whole without this little one in my arms. In those moments I felt buoyed. Was the falling sensation I felt actually a rising—a trick of the mind?

No, that wasn’t the case. At least not in any comprehensive, lasting way.

It’s hard to say what exactly triggered me to finally shut down that January day—to batten the hatches, boarding up windows and barricading with sandbags as if to protect myself against a storm I had been watching move toward me. Now I know this about depression: the “what” or “why” hardly matters. It’s not as if identifying “what” means it could all be easily “fixed.” It just was what it was—a mix of chemicals and hormones, disappointments and anxieties, fear and regret, converging and swirling. And suddenly that day, that moment, I couldn’t keep up the charade that had kept me inching forward on previous days.

I could only sit, blankly. Sometimes with quiet tears forging new paths down my cheeks.

Finally, while my baby napped, I called my mom. I couldn’t speak, of course—couldn’t begin to explain a thing about what was happening inside me. But she still heard me, like mothers do. She heard the tears from 70 miles away, where she sat in my childhood home, and she knew I was stuck; she knew I needed to move.

“I’m coming to get you,” she said matter-of-factly, not asking or suggesting, only stating the fact in a way that allowed me to breathe a bit deeper.

So I sat as she drove to me through the frozen world. I don’t remember her arriving at my house, or helping me pack a few bags, transferring the baby’s carseat from my car to hers. I only remember the drive home—to the place I still considered home. I was, after all, only a decade removed from the time I had last lived there, the summer I was 19.

291654079_bc3cf3ce06_bMy mom had dark chocolate in her car, and as we traveled she told me to eat as much as I wanted—that it was good for me. She didn’t ask me to explain anything, didn’t ply me with questions or ask what I wanted or needed. She simply directed and gave, taking the wheel both literally and figuratively as she moved me from point A to point B.

As we traveled I felt the panic and confusion within me dislodge and begin to move downstream. I cracked open the shutters on my mind and began to take in where I was: The warmth of the car and bitter-sweetness of the chocolate. The beauty of the snow stretching out from either side of the two-lane highway—the way it was whimsical decorating the evergreens, and then sophisticated blanketing the ground, seeming to change color as it rose on hills and dipped into valleys, the late afternoon sun slanting onto its smooth surfaces.

I took in the one-stoplight towns in a way I never had before, even though I’d passed through them dozens of times behind the wheel of my own car. There were people on the sidewalks, bundled against the cold: a mother walking slowly as her snowsuited toddler kicked his boots through the snow; a group of three teenage girls who seemed to meander and stall, in spite of the cold.

The towns were then behind us, the speed limit rose, and I saw the sad, sinking homes down along the river, a man getting out of his rusted truck, pulled up alongside a satellite dish. Closer to home, the terrain flattened, presenting farm houses and sleeping winter fields. There was nothing remarkable along that stretch of road—no one, I imagine, living remarkable lives. There were just lives, and I noticed them as my mother carried me along.

Toward the end of our journey she told me a story about when she was a young mom—not to say “I know exactly how you feel,” but just, I suppose, to broaden my perspective and help me see beyond the walls of my confining mind, just as putting me in the car helped me to see beyond the walls of my house, my life, which had become too small.

What my mother knew, what she taught me, is that becoming “unstuck” involves some form of moving, traveling, even if you don’t know exactly where you need to go.

 

Good to Be Home?

It’s always the same, coming home from a vacation–that last block before our house.

We drive up the hill, and turn under a canopy of locust trees. On our left, there’s the big rhododendron bush, the vacant duplex with the colorful window frames, two red brick rentals, and grass. On the right, there’s trash tucked into the undergrowth, and sometimes a neighborhood deer, nosing through a discarded fast food bag.

“Boo!” I might say to the deer. And if the leftovers aren’t that fascinating, the deer might even look up. City deer are never afraid; I could yell, “We’ve been away! For weeks. We were really far away. Didn’t you miss us?”

And if deer could roll their big doe eyes, she just might. But instead we drive on, pulling up in front of our house.

Home! Finally, we’re home. But how can coming home feel so familiar and so surreal, all at the same time?

* * * * *

Several years ago we made the adventurous (or foolish) decision to drive to New Orleans with a three and a five year old. There and back again, with overnights at a friends’ house in Charlotte and a cabin in the northeastern Alabama woods, it was about thirty-five hours of driving.

And after thirty-five hours of the Veggie-Tales CD, let me tell you, we were ready to come home. But as we drove that familiar last block (no deer that night), waved to our neighbors, and greeted our black cat, something wasn’t quite right.

It was as if we had never left. But we had. After two weeks and two thousand miles, our eyes were now accustomed to new sights and unfamiliar places. I felt uneasy in the old and familiar.

Strange.

But there wasn’t much time for reflection. Instead, there were tasks–get the girls in bed, empty the cooler, take off the bikes. Home quickly became a to-do list. Our room was the aftermath of our two-weeks-previous packing tornado. The girls room was worse. A Goodwill trip, perhaps a dumpster, was in order. I suddenly became nostalgic about living out of suitcases.

It was home. It was really overwhelming.

5861512547_e3e80f63b3_oTime had passed, things had changed, but the same skirt that I had rejected while packing was still sitting on my bed. I regarded it as a foreign object–the North Carolina mountains seemed nearer. Was it only a week ago that I biked the streets of New Orleans? And that lovely cabin in Alabama… I could almost smell the pine trees. Were all of these places and moments just postcards and photographs now?

I threw the skirt off the bed and lay down.

* * * * *

The next morning I had some coffee in the backyard. The chickens were doing their chicken-y things in the run, the kids were swinging under the magnolia tree,  and the sun was shining through everything green.

It was good to be home.

Eventually I slowed down enough to remember one of my favorite quotes. From G.K. Chesterton. The words rippled through my head as I sipped from my warm mug, stilling me.

The fatal metaphor of progress, which means leaving things behind us, has utterly obscured the real idea of growth, which means leaving things inside us. 

Ah… here was a key. I took another sip.

The thing about coming home is that it is work. Good work. But it is not only the work of unpacking, laundry and trying to find the darn cellphone charger. It’s not just returning to my email inbox, catching up at the office, or purging excess stuff. Coming home is also the work of figuring out what my experiences of far-away places will mean in my close-to-home places.

Coming home is allowing myself to be different than I was, and giving the left-inside things room to grow. And as I sat there, under the same magnolia tree, surrounded by the same neighbors and the same city deer, gearing up to clean my room, I sighed and smiled.

“There’d better be some new things in there,” I thought, laying a hand on my breastbone as if I might feel something move. “Two thousand miles is a long was to go for some postcards.”

 

Postcard picture by Else-Marla Tennessen 

Moments from The Open Road

“Mind if I add deer meat to the burger?”

Sitting out on the porch overlooking the large garden and the stunning Appalachian Mountains, I didn’t mind at all. I rocked back and forth absorbing the beauty of the life my friends had created. Their 7-year old entertained me with a story about a box car race which she had recently won. A large piece of metal sculpture fashioned by the artistic hands of her dad was just on the edge of my vision.  The clouds and the mountains and the storm and the trees created a ever-changing, ever-the-same view.

From the mushrooms they planted in a stack of wood to the tractor seat that served as the swing set, I soaked in their life. We chatted with joy about the little one who was growing, still hidden in mommy’s tummy, and looked with reverence at the small momentos that give witness to the little ones they had lost along the way.

After dinner, we pulled the bed out of the sleeper sofa and knelt by the edge of their children’s bunkbed to say prayers. The cool mountain air coming in the window and the house creaking with quiet noises, I settled in to the peace of their small mountain home. In the morning, the sound of bread-making roused me from restful sleep.

A loving whisper gently filled the silence, “It’s time to get ready for school, sweetheart.”


I folded two dollar bills and slipped them into the tip can. “Can you do Danny’s Song?,” I asked. Just in case, I sang my favorite line at full voice, “Even though we ain’t got money…” He had a startled look for a moment, probably not a typical request.

“Yah.  Absolutely.” He fiddled with a gadget, something that provided the words and the chords.

I had spent the afternoon rambling through Savannah, exploring and snapping photos of interesting patterns and angles. Where the strap met my sweaty skin, my sandals had  rubbed large raw spots across the top of my feet. Every step was painful.

Hot, sweaty, and footsore, I became attuned to the couples. They were everywhere. I slipped into a mini-funk, a grumpster state. Sitting on a bench, I fiddled with my phone, not ready to go back to my hotel room but unable to keep walking. Nobody answered.

Casually dressed and with tousled hair, he was singing and playing guitar at the bar & grill on the corner of the square. It was the perfect blend of country and folk and soulful melodies. I sat and listened for over an hour, my heart slowly lulled into a happier state. Eventually, I mustered the courage to go and sit at a table. And with dinner ordered and a beer drank, I mustered the courage to make a song request.

You bring a tear of joy to my eye and tell me everything is gonna be alright.

When he sang the chorus, big, inexplicable tears rolled down my check.  They were the tears of a beautiful moment, part of which I had created and part of which I had been given.  Tears of gratitude and heartache, of goodness and beauty.

My heart, long asleep, stirred.


Although suffering the effects of a rotten cold, my joyful friend greeted the day with her typical morning vibrance, “DisneyWorld, here we come!”

I drug myself out of morning fog and with the enthusiasm that I could muster in the morning, replied, “Whoo-hoo!”

As I thought about completion of graduate school, I had gotten it my head that I wanted to see the Magic Kingdom on my way home. Florida is not really on the way to Arizona but I didn’t care. When we realized that she would be in Florida for a graduation, it sealed the deal. By temperament, she’s a planner and so, we made plans months in advance. I messed it up and arrived a day early. Whoops.

It could have been weird. I was on the pull-out couch in a large hotel room with my long-time friend and her newly-wed husband. But, it wasn’t. I was tempted to be weirded out by the the lack of weirdness but instead, accepted it in gratitude. As the two had become one at the altar, I had gained a new friend.

We arrived at the theme park, googling “How to Use a Fast Pass” as we made our way to the entrance. With cold symptoms at their peak, we knew we only had a few hours before exhaustion won out. We tapped into the efficiency skills at hand and came up with a plan. In between the plan, we had spontaneous moments, ducking into the less thrilling attractions which were flooded with childhood memories and children.

It was an easy day. A day of innocent entertainment, deep friendships, and celebration of happy things. A day where goodness triumphed.

My melancholic soul was light-hearted and unafraid.


I’m not sure the attraction of a rambling solo road trip but it definitely calls to me. Whenever I can, I choose the smaller scenic roads, marked by a dotted line on the old-school atlas lodged between the seats of my car. I would rather go slow and be bathed in nature–the Shenandoah Valley, the Ozarks, the open sky of my beloved Southwest.  Or, go out of my way to have a quick visit with a friend.

The stretches of open road and the moments in between teach me. Home. Beauty. Lightness. On the road, there is just enough going on that you can be in your head without focusing on being in your head.  You can look back on moments and see their depth. That’s a sweet spot for me.

Days ago, my road trip ended as I drove up the dirt driveway of my childhood place–the home that my father built around us as we grew. Now, in the rhythm of regular life, I am trying to build new habits, to remember new ways. I have returned home

…at least until another road opens up in front of me.11078154_10153371527107943_3090907364091819517_n

A Passage Home in a Passing World

The morning rose as promise quickly succumbed to the extravagance of the mounting sun. Five of my best friends and I were headed west through the high plains near Lubbock under the cracking brilliance of a Texas summer morning. This was the fulfillment of our pact made almost a year before to drive to San Diego and back after we graduated from High School. The road and its rushing welcome beckoned us westward into the long journey that would echo through our lives for the next ten years as we would return again and again to the road together every following summer.

We passed into New Mexico in the early afternoon and found ourselves in the middle of nothingness. Clouds like clots stood against the oppressing light casting shadows onto the speckled desert. Our car passed as a breath through the dry cavity, and in it, the green roots of deep friendships were growing deeper.

***********************************

    I often wonder if my home is the road. Upon Texas highways I have experienced more beauty and joy than anywhere else.

The countless sunset drives where every sunset original in its peculiar quality grabs the deepest pieces of me and puts them together. Nights under stars uttering mystery in the tongues of ancient light. Late shadows cast sidelong by trees only glimpsed but caught in my memory forever. Middle of May wildflowers, Bluebonnets and Indian Blankets, painting a canvass of glory just outside a middle-of-nowhere Texas town. The rushing surprise of spring bursting forth in a shade of green I had almost forgotten in the winter. All of these are visions of the road, hints of home in a passing  world, and the passing only makes it sweeter.

Nothing awakens in me the poetic sense of experience more than the road. The road as an archetype signals a new hope, and when I drive, I hope for home.

*****************************************

    Somewhere along our first day’s drive in New Mexico, we stopped and ran around naked through a boy scout campsite for a while acting as if the world were really all here for us to romp through. This led to a speedy getaway back into the summer evening. When we finally caught our breath and reminded each other what we had actually done, we smiled and began to speak to one another in a new way. The night took us as I drove us west, and each of us conversed with the other slower and deeper.

Night closed and there were no lights. Nothing before us, nothing behind us. There was only blackness and our meagre headlights. Our car was a mere passenger clinging to the two lane road. The space of the car and the 20 feet our headlights pierced in front of us were all we had, yet we twisted through the dark world with joy.

Each head in the car slowly nodded off, and I drove on alone. The deepest darkness I had ever known enshrouded our now seemingly miniature vessel as it forged deeper into the nights mystery. I had never been so alone with others around me. After ten minutes of driving silently and looking around at the void on all sides, I stuck my head out of the driver’s side window and caught a glimpse of the high, moonless, New Mexico sky.

The sky was softly illuminated with a million stars buried on top of one another in the deep ocean of space. Their light was far away, but the stars tangled the entire sky with their white shimmer. I rolled the window all the way down and climbed out of my seat keeping one hand on the wheel as I sat on the window with most of my torso out of the car and my face free.

I drove this way for a moment before climbing back into my seat. The widow rolled back up and the space within was still and silent once again. I looked down at the glowing green clock reading 11:54 P.M., and I felt a wave of exhaustion creep up the back of my neck. The road passed in twenty foot increments as I drove wearily on, and I turned inward to my own deeper thoughts for the first time all day. I was alone, and my mind recalled the weeping nights I had spent on my bed the past year feeling the caving in of my own heart.

We rolled on westwardly weaving our way as a narrow passage of light through the darkness. Above, we were being watched by the infinitely interwoven stars.

Where I Came From: 5,000 Miles and Back Again

When I was a little girl with two brown pigtails and bangs cut straight across my forehead, home was a grey-blue ranch-style house situated in the middle of Michigan’s palm. It was also a musty-smelling blue canvas tent, the sweaty brown vinyl backseat of a station wagon, and the open road, always leading to someplace new.

 *  *  *  *  *

If “home” is defined as a specific place, then my answer to “Where are you from?” is clear: I’m from St. Johns, Michigan, a town of about 12,000 people with a two-stoplight Main Street that’s anchored on the south end by a classic Midwestern courthouse. My parents still live in the house they bought when I was just five, and when we visit today, my own daughters sleep in my childhood bedroom.

All the kids who went to my elementary school lived in town like me, but by the time we were in middle school, our classmates were pretty evenly split between “town kids” and the “country kids” who grew up on surrounding farms. (My best friend Rhonda was a country kid with horses we rode on the weekends.)

Besides sleepovers and football games, there weren’t many parent-approved things to do for fun, at least not until we were old enough to drive the half hour to Lansing for date-worthy restaurants, movies, and malls. But St. Johns was a good place to be a kid. Growing up in a sheltered town meant plenty of freedom to bike everywhere—the city pool, friends’ houses, the library, and the bakery for custard-filled long johns. We didn’t wear helmets or lock our bikes—the only requirement was a wristwatch so we wouldn’t be late for dinner.

But even with such deep roots in a single place, I also grew up with an understanding of home that was nomadic: Home was wherever you stopped and pitched the tent when it was time to cook dinner. bluetent

My parents were both teachers, which meant summers offered more time than money. Flying from Michigan to visit relatives on the West Coast wasn’t in the budget, so each summer we packed up our wood-paneled station wagon and hit the road for about six weeks.

I was prone to carsickness, so there were just two ways I rode in the car: sprawled asleep across the backseat or awake and perched dead center, leaning forward until I was almost as much in the front seat with my parents as I was in the back. Luckily, my big brother was never the sort to draw a line down the middle of the seat and enforce it with punches or pinches. Besides, I think he was happy to let me chatter away to my parents, leaving him in relative peace with his books.

The ultimate destinations we drove toward—a visit with our grandparents in L.A. or our favorite cousins in Portland, a week spent hiking in Glacier National Park, or a few days exploring San Francisco—were well-worth the 5,000-or-so miles we covered each summer. But so many days were devoted to just getting there, driving through endless-seeming states like Nebraska or North Dakota, only stopping for gas, bathroom breaks, and to eat the sandwiches Mom had made at the campground that morning.

After a full day of driving, as the sun was lowering in the sky and Mom’s voice was hoarse from reading aloud Little House on the Prairie books, we pulled out a thick campground guide and chose a place to stay—with a pool, if my brother and I were lucky. At the campground, Mom pulled out the camp stove and started dinner while the rest of us got to work setting up the tent and filling it with sleeping bags and pillows. The next morning it all came down again, was packed back into the car, and we drove some more—to the next place we would call “home” for a night.

*  *  *  *  *

Now, when I think about where I come from, I still envision that ever-present grey-blue house, first. I am very much a small-town Michigan girl. But it occurs to me that my rootedness in that place has always been filtered through an understanding of other places—of treeless plains and impressive peaks, of rugged beaches with magical tide pools, and of Chinatowns and subways, operas and contemporary art. I knew where I was back home in Michigan because I also knew where I wasn’t.

And in that sense, I come from places that protected me as well as places that exposed me—from a small Michigan town and big Montana mountains; from the inside of a station wagon, where my entire family was always close enough to touch, to a crowded San Francisco sidewalk where strangers pressed in as I absorbed glimpses of the world.

stationwagonPhotographs by William E. Tennant