Kindergarten Moments
One day, a couple weeks ago, I broke down in tears in front of my nine-year-old daughter.
Not a quiet, casual cry. A deep reckoning. In front of a human I have vowed to raise and cherish and protect. Above all else.
I’m her adult in the room. And at that moment, I felt anything but.
I talk about this concept a lot. I call them kindergarten moments. They typically happen when some big new adulting has occurred. Signing your first lease without a parental co-sign. Buying a house. Having a baby. Getting married. Getting a career job. Being a manager of a team. Meeting with the school. Presenting to the Board. Breaking off your engagement. Making your first hire.
They are moments where I say in my head “Wait, why is anyone letting me do this? I’m still in kindergarten.”
Earlier, I had said to my husband, half-joking (but not really), “Maybe I’m just dying.” Because everything felt wrong in my body (check out any of my blogs on perimenopause for clues on how we got here). I’m no stranger to the fact that when your body feels wrong long enough, your brain starts telling stories.
I have a heart arrhythmia. Benign but unsettling. My heart skips hundreds of beats a day and then sometimes makes up for the skipped beats. It can disappear for months and then reappear just to remind me it’s still there. It’s not life threatening, but can be painful.
Today, it happened twice. It certainly happened many more times than that, but what I mean is that it was painful twice. Painful enough that I have to stop and wait out the feeling that I can’t breathe.
I also have nerve damage in my arms and muscle damage in my back from a car accident I was in when I was 16. I’ll spare you the details, and just spoil the ending. My back is in a perpetual state of spasm, and I have a constant dull, nervy ache in my arms.
And when I was in my early 20s, I broke my collarbone during a snowboarding accident and it didn’t heal properly. My shoulders love that.
Oh, and after gaining 55 lbs (25 kgs) during pregnancy, and then carrying my daughter around for the next few years (baby wearing for the win!) I have a chronically stuck hip that causes so many issues from my lower back to my lower leg that I can’t even begin to tell you.
All this to say, I had my fair share of body pain long before my hormones started punishing me. So when I recently started experiencing shooting nerve pain up and down my legs, it’s not surprising that I shook my fists at the heavens and exclaimed “What more do you want from me?”
On top of that my period was a week late. I felt bloated, heavy, foggy, and not at all like myself. I wanted to cry all day, for no clear reason and for every reason all at once. So I did. I broke down in tears, sitting on the side of my bed.
My daughter quietly followed me into the room, wrapped her arms around me, and said “Come here. Come here.”
She says “come here” the way a comforting mom might, someone who has lived a full life and knows better than to ask follow-up questions. Not urgently. Not sweetly. Just practical. Like: We’re not doing this from across the room. Bring it in.
That alone cracked something open. Because I’m supposed to be the comforting mom. And yet there I was, being held by a nine-year-old who somehow knew exactly what to do.
This is the part of life no one prepared me for. The way physical symptoms have stacked on top of emotional ones. The way hormones blur the line between something is wrong and everything is wrong. The way midlife (or perimenopause, or chronic stress, or motherhood, or society’s expectations, or all of it together) can make you feel like you’re slowly losing your own body.
Nothing feels dramatic enough for the ER. Nothing feels small enough to ignore.
I’m not dying. I’m not broken beyond repair. And I’m not alone, even when it feels that way.
Some days, the work isn’t healing or fixing or optimizing. Some days, the work is simply noticing. Naming. Letting myself — yourself — be seen in the mess of it.
That was one of those days.
And if you’ve had one like it too, where your body feels foreign, your emotions feel loud, and your child ends up being the brave one, know that you are not failing. You are not weak. You’re just human, living inside a body that’s trying to tell you something.
So listen. Even if you don’t understand the language it is speaking yet.
