Actually an Artist

I mean, this is a pretty softball question in my opinion! Yes, I grew a lot when I went to college, and when I moved to France, and then when we got married. But becoming parents was a struggle and it really made me into who I am today. It unfortunately left me with trauma but I got a great therapist out of it and when we got to work unravelling the situation the thread just kept coming and coming… When we were done, I was making big changes. We moved and started over, but then the depression was still there and so I got to work with a different therapist who I was with for over four years.

Our first baby was only 2 when the pandemic hit and that spurred me inward in new ways. With the progress I was making in therapy, the depression was less overbearing and I began learning more about contemplation and different expressions of spirituality. Since much of what went down after the birth of my son had to do with work and my church/spirituality, and since covid had closed churches (at least the ones that didn’t want to kill people…), I was left with a void that I explored in different ways until I came upon spiritual direction and care as something that people do both for themselves but also study to offer others. There was no one specific experience during this time where I saw a new path, instead, it was a lot of little books and experiences that added up to major shifts in how I thought of myself and what I thought for myself.

Matthew 13:⁴⁴ “The kingdom of heaven is like treasure hidden in a field. When a man found it, he hid it again, and then in his joy went and sold all he had and bought that field.

Jesus taught mainly using parables which is bad news if you want hard and fast concrete teachings to wield against yourself or others. Take this one:
Chew on that for a minute. For years, I thought these parables about what the kingdom of heaven was like were unimportant for me because they were so confusing. First, it seemed odd that someone would deceive others to obtain a thing, and that would be considered holy. It also seemed odd to be comparing something spiritual to something material, and it also seemed unlikely to me that anyone would encounter anything that would elicit such a response as to sell all you have to get that one thing. That seemed a bit like what the billionaire class is up to; selling their selves for more money, more power. Well, something about this time in my life made this parable hit differently, and suddenly becoming a spiritual director was that treasure in a field. My husband had lost his job and my online teaching had suddenly taken off, so while we didn’t exactly have much spare money, it was conceivable to me to give up everything my family didn’t absolutely need in order to pursue spiritual direction. I could understand how and why someone would single-mindedly pursue just one thing for just about the first time in my life and I could understand how alluring the kingdom of God is. And I understood that search, because the meaning of this parable and that intense feeling had been hidden from me for so long (33 years!)

I was in an intensive period of discernment, but something else was happening, too. My depression was back despite me having been stable for over six months. After my husband lost his job, I went to the doctor for a routine check, but we still hadn’t heard about health insurance or medicaid. I got back to the room and just started silently crying. The nurse was so kind and trying to cheer me up, but ultimately my doctor came in and was like, we’re not going to charge you for today, but we do want to talk about this… I was still crying and I couldn’t really give any reason why. I left not with checks to my thyroid as originally planned, but with a prescription for Sertraline, an ssri I hadn’t tried before.

I was still in therapy, and back on medication, and things improved a bit, but it was a struggle. My husband (again, who’d just gotten fired) was experiencing extreme anxiety and would ‘check out’ so much sometimes I’d wonder if I could leave him with our toddler to go work. I had found a treasure, I wanted to buy the field, but something was holding me back in a big way. Well, in April of that year (four months from that doctor appointment), I discovered why when I came into the kitchen in the morning as he was taking a drink of cheap vodka.

I don’t know that there are any wholly accurate words for that experience, but I know that I’m not alone in it, and neither is he. It’s hard to describe, though feeling my stomach drop is pretty close. I saw him, I packed up our kid, and I went grocery shopping. As I walked slowly down the aisles I wondered if I was about to move out, if he was going to curl up into a fetal position and collapse entirely in on himself if I did, I wondered what I needed to do for our kid. We’d been together for ten years. I wondered about starting over. I couldn’t keep our kid at the store so I got home knowing that if my husband didn’t come clean I would be packing up and moving in with my parents. Fortunately, he did.
He spent the next few days detoxing cold-turkey. I spent it crying in bed in between times when I had to function to work or care for our son. It was excruciating. Our marriage as it had been died and over the next few months with therapy and very brutally honest communication, we rebuilt it. But it was a death, and it was a resurrection.

At the same time, I had asked my current spiritual director to officially be my director and I had my first session five days after. Becoming a spiritual director was no longer a priority. The hesitation I had felt before seemed to make sense; I knew there was something at home not quite right and I knew that I wasn’t ready as much as I felt excited and motivated.

Although a lot of the rest of what happened next I still hold close, a lot of good and beauty came out of it. We repaired, and in December we decided to grow our family. Now, almost four years later, he’s still sober, and we have a healthier way of communicating and are stronger than ever. Spiritual Direction is still something I hold close, though currently I’m just a directee, not a director. That will hopefully change, soon-tba! 🙂

I’ve written a lot of words, but I’ll leave you with some pictures over the past 7 years of parenting and living and growing. I’m so proud of what we’ve done when handed really really hard stuff, and we couldn’t have done it without being surrounded by love and support. We all deserve no less, I think. The wider community isn’t so much a part of this retelling of the story, but that doesn’t mean that there weren’t a lot of people loving us and helping us forward. We are all better together.