1. The Tether
The tether. That thing that binds us to our families of origin, not by any desire of our own, but through the mere act of existence. We spend our lives exploring the roots of this connection, be it to an unending wellspring of love or the heavy, unshakeable burden of pain.
In its healthiest form, the tether is meant to eternally connect us to a place of love and acceptance. It ties us to the hearts of those who know our deepest flaws and greatest mistakes and yet love us anyway. It is the place we can always return to and the greatest security life can offer us. The very existence of an umbilical cord, that first biological tether in utero, suggests the importance of this tie between humans.
A broken tether exposes us to the greatest anxiety a human can know- the potential of being detached and alone in the world. It leaves us in freefall. To be deemed unloveable by the humans we need most to love us, or the person who committed to do so until death do part, shifts something in our interior life that we can never fully regain. It is antithetical to the existence of humans, the deepest pain one can experience. And yet, almost all of us will experience it at some point in our lives.
Like so many others, my life has known a series of these breaks. I carry the frayed cords with me and finger the scars where they once attached. For a long time, I stared at the empty space where someone once existed, screaming my pain into the void and trying to call them back. There is a sort of blind madness that eventually settles in- the push and pull between the self-destruction of unlovability and the desire to be better, to be lovable. It is a tension that consumed the early years of my adulthood, that even now I wrestle with.
As I grew older, I skirted the great abyss of that pain with whatever resources I could find. There are days of my early twenties that I can’t recall and can’t account for. When you’re misbehaving, no one asks about the pain you’re in. They only demand that you be better, that you stop causing trouble, that you figure it out... and that you do it all quick. You feel the shame of those pointed fingers, but you don’t change. Not for lack of desire but for lack of knowhow… and the unrelenting conviction that you deserve nothing more than the chaos you’ve created for yourself. The world confirms what you already know- you belong on the outskirts- you are screwed up, immoral, wrong, bad, unwanted, unloved- you don’t belong at all.
Sustenance. When I was 23, unwed, and pregnant, a well meaning friend asked if I loved the father of my child, a man with whom I’d had only a casual relationship. When I responded in the negative, she asked, “why did you sleep with him, then?” The question floored me, not for the directness of it but for its naivety. Not only was it weighted with disapproval and disappointment, but it seemed to lack an essential understanding of human need. Love was a luxury I had yet to attain in my 23 years of life. Sex was the closest substitute I had found. The why was not a question worth asking. Nor was it one I could answer.
How could I have said that I simply wanted to be known, that I wanted to be seen, held, and desired, for whatever span of time was available to me? That I wanted a reprieve from the constant ache and the exhausting anxiety of aloneness. I could not afford to contemplate the rightness or wrongness of a thing. The human soul requires sustenance and when deprived, it will beg, borrow, or steal to be fed.
And so, what is goodness? Even then, it was something I believed in, something I aspired to. I once believed in the absolute value of right and wrong, in every moral platitude that had been thrown my way since I was a small child. In righteousness and fervor and good intentions. I had been raised in a church that marked the path to heaven by good behavior, and I had tried with every fiber of my being to walk it. But somewhere between 13 and 23, I had come to believe that I was innately and irrevocably on the wrong side. I could see the same unanimous consensus reflected in the eyes of teachers, parents, and pastors alike. I was the unwelcome guest at their table- too much to manage, too far gone for hope. All of my strivings could not save me.
I wish I had understood then that that was the point.
The best I could do was assemble a sense of connection and belonging among the other misfits and miscreants whose spheres I orbited. I found myself most comfortable in the craggy, shaded cracks of existence, where there was little expected and no one to disappoint. I eschewed those who professed to believe in my potential. I wounded those who got too close.
Still, I desired so much. I desired to know the dappled, laughter-ridden love I caught glimpses of in passing. I desired to give voice to the being inside of me who felt good and kind and smart and capable. I desired to understand the presence I felt when I whispered passionate prayers to the being who had been so tangible since childhood. I desired wholeness. I desired love. And most of all, I desired a reprieve from the unidentifiable, aching pain that had defined so much of my life.
Grace. I am trying to articulate something here, something I barely understand now. I follow the path from where I am today back to that weary, broken place of my youth and try to understand it all. It was desire that propelled me… but not that sustained me.
It turns out that the goodness I had tried to embody in my youth was irrelevant. This Christian world I had been raised in taught me to strive for perfection at the threat of rejection. The church as I knew it was not a place of unrelenting love but rather of judgement and condemnation. It set expectations unrealistic for a child who had already known trauma and pain and despair. The emphasis was on the behavior… not on the grace.
It wasn’t until motherhood that I discovered the reality of grace. Grace, that element so crucial to our survival. There was a season when I was consumed by my own fallibility- by what it meant for my daughter and what it implied for her own future. I was humanly incapable of the perfection I yearned for, even perhaps of the goodness. In my place of despair, I was profoundly overwhelmed by the ugly, seemingly dangerous, pieces of myself. I knew that change to the degree that I desired simply was not possible.
And then I encountered someone who understood the mystery. “There will be things you cannot change,” he said. “It is true. And that is the grace of life. Your own strivings are of little value. It is within our brokenness that we make room for God, for others, for grace. It is the Spirit within you who provides.”
I came to understand that it is through our own fallibility that we gain the empathy necessary to truly connect to others. Our brokenness is not the end point. It is the starting point. It is the place where we meet God, where we learn the truth of love, where we are vulnerable enough to allow ourselves to be seen and known by those who care for us. These wounds are fundamental to our existence as humans, as fundamental as the joy and happiness that we also strive for. We must hold these things in tandem.
I had gathered the broken tethers of my life and held them as evidence of the ways in which I have been unlovable. But I was wrong. Each of those tethers left a gaping hole in me. But each of those holes provided space by which… as Rumi says… the Light can enter. They are not my broken places. They are the places that stand to become the strongest and most whole.
These essays are an exploration of the frayed and broken tethers in my life. There are many that I seek to understand and even some that I seek to repair. I invite you to join me in this exploration.