How fitting a metaphor, this losing of my mind; how else must it appear to them? Of course their mother has lost her mind. What other explanation could there be for suddenly abandoning this marriage, abandoning the stability of their lives? Of course their mother’s brain is struggling to function, the mother they knew slowly leaking away, a bathtub draining, a blown-up raft deflating. That is the only way this could be happening. What other explanation could be possible? That I would choose this?
And in their story, if I become fixed, does that fix them, too? There could be a version of this story in which instead of this family leaking away, becoming smaller, it comes together, it rallies, their dad sticks by me, we stay together. They don’t understand that this part of the story has been foretold, that developments have taken place in a prequel they haven’t read. The only way this comes together is by breaking apart, reconfiguring. But they can’t see that. They see me flat, or standing, confused, my illness becoming a part of the general parental drone. Lights off, take a shower, get your shoes on, brush your teeth, eat your food before it gets cold, take a sweater, my head is killing me. I worry this is killing them.
Back in the fog again, I’m rendered incapable of narrative. And yet once I’m there, flat, in the fog, the me who is Me safely tucked away in a fortress of pain, reduced to merely acknowledging that thoughts exist, I can see how clearly my thoughts behave without me to direct them. This, I will remember later, is the aim of all the books I have read on Buddhism, all the meditation podcasts I have listened to, all the teachings I’ve encountered: to understand that you are not your thoughts, and your thoughts are not you.
But this doesn’t feel like enlightenment, as I struggle to think, as I sense a part of my brain continuing on without me. It feels terrifying.
The Buddhists have a word for that, too: groundlessness.
Enveloped in fog, I’m faced with the limits of my storytelling, the fruitlessness of storytelling.
Attempting to trace this back to the beginning of everything is merely an exercise. Coming up with a theory, a plausible fairy tale, of how it started doesn’t change the facts of where I am now. Telling myself the story of how my relationship unraveled doesn’t knit it back together. Following the trail back into the past changes nothing about the present.
And yet this is the work of the self. This is the work of the brain, the work of the mind: creating narrative, finding patterns, puzzling things into place.
This is the work I must do with my children: help them understand the story of their lives, help them place these things in a context, help them frame a narrative around the disruption of everything they’ve known.
And yet don’t these stories just distract? Don’t they obfuscate? Don’t they hide the truth, which is that there is no narrative, and nothing makes sense, and there is no pattern, and the world is uncaring, cruel, no lessons to learn, no moral, no upside, just the brutal facts of this happening, and then this happening, and then this happening?
I tell them: There are lots of different ways to be a family. I tell them: Look at all the people you know in your life and the way their families are, the way your friends seamlessly move between one household and another, the way it is just a fact that they have two families, or two moms, or two dads, or four moms, or three places to go. These people are on the other side of where you are, but at one point they were here, where you are now, confused and upset and unsure about how to navigate this transition. There is a map for this, and while someone else’s map won’t look exactly like yours, and the terrain you travel to get where you’re going might be different from theirs, it is a path you can follow. This is a thing other people have done. Our family isn’t the first to change its configuration.
I tell them: Here are the things that won’t change—that I love you, and that you will always come first in my heart; that your dad loves you, and that he always will, no matter whether he lives here or somewhere else. I tell them: This isn’t the ending of the story, although it feels like the end. This is somewhere in the middle, a turning point, a journey into the woods where a protagonist wanders, seemingly alone, and encounters magical, secret things that will change them profoundly. It’s the part where things seem bleakest. The part before the part where everything turns out fine.
I tell them stories, I tell them to think of stories, even though I doubt the power of stories to do anything but lie about the painful truth of this pain, physical, emotional, that affects us all.
In fact, we have all been betrayed by the story I’ve been telling.
The story I’ve been telling them—that everything is okay, that the way things are in our house is normal, sustainable—is a lie. The story I’ve been telling them about our lives—that everything is stable and dependable, that feelings pass and that brains are powerful and that reframing things to better understand them is the right way to cope—is a lie. The true story is that things are not fine, that things are not sustainable, that things are out of our control, that pain cannot be mitigated, that making things work means acknowledging that they are broken, unfixable. But how can I tell them that?
I have been a storyteller like the narrators in fairy tales, beginning and ending things with the hand-wavey vagueness of once upon a times and happily ever afters. I have been a
