Parenting Page: "Reruns"

At age 52, so many of my days blur together into a vague repetition of moments I've already experienced. Sometimes I can't quite put my finger on when or where they've happened before. But this week the déjà vu has been anything but vague. With frightening clarity I've been watching the rerun of a bad television show I saw years ago but never figured out how to erase.

It started out on Monday when I was holding a 4-year old on my lap at work. I won't go into her history, but it sucks. She'd been crying all morning because the impending visit with her 19-year-old mom had been cancelled. Mom had run away from the group home where she lived, and somehow her little girl had found out she was gone. After sobbing for over an hour and feeling very desperate and hopeless, she looked up at me and said, "Will you look for my mom on your way home?" It was one of those moments when I wanted to ask God what the hell he was thinking, and why do kids have to go through such nightmares before they can even recite the alphabet. But I knew, even as I was contemplating the outcome of such a meeting with the Almighty, that it wasn't just this little girl with the tear-soaked shirt that made me feel physically sick and emotionally exhausted. It was the show in my head that keeps playing over and over again.

When you get screwed by your parents, you never get over it. I know, because I'm a therapist, and I've gotten screwed. People in our lives are so unpredictable. It's a wonder we love anyone, but we do. And sometimes things go terribly wrong. The last time I spoke to my brother, he told me to "get over it." That was in 2004.

So, back to my rerun. After work Monday I went out with a friend I had wanted to get to know better. She told me all about her trip to see her parents and how happy she was that they have been so supportive of her. Then, the inevitable question, "So, tell me about your parents. Are they in town?" I politely told her that they didn't live in St. Louis, and quickly changed the subject. We'll go there another day, a day when I haven’t already used up my emotional quota.

The rest of this week has not gone much better. Episode after episode plays in my head as I helplessly search for the delete button. The boundaries between reruns and the feature presentation become confused. It’s like going to see a movie at the theatre and being sucked into the previews at the beginning. Only my previews are trailers of old movies and the images they leave behind keep me from focusing on the movie I came to watch.

This morning I sat on the back porch for my usual time of meditation before heading out to work. The Almighty had been watching and listening all week and decided it was time to speak up. Even though I had cancelled my appointment with him, he wanted to meet with me. And he always gets his way. As I opened the book I've been reading by Henri Nouwen, there it was. Henri thinks he wrote page 17, but I'm quite sure when he wrote it 30 years ago he had a co-author who was thinking of me. It talked about how, inside all of us, are a lion and a lamb. The lamb is the vulnerable part of us that needs nurturing, affection, support. The lion is the confident part of ourselves that can take action and be assertive. But the lamb needs to learn to make friends with the lion so that they can lie down together. That’s my problem. I haven’t made friends with the lamb. I see it as the enemy. But really it’s my vulnerability, my pain that I am fighting, my need for God that I am denying.

I hate my reruns. But I need to make friends with them. To not allow them to be bigger than they are. After all, they are only reruns. As such, they will play again. Maybe tonight, maybe in a month. But I am living in the Feature Presentation, and my screenwriter is amazing.

-Carolyn