On things changing and staying the same.

I began this blog seventeen years ago and named it Journey Mama because of a dream. I felt stuck and needed to travel in words and memories, needed to journey even if I wasn’t physically going anywhere.

Things change, and they stay the same. I feel stuck now, too, though I live across the world from where I did back then. Though I live in an interesting, glowing, incredible place. I did then, too. My stuck-ness seems to come from within.

And yet, there is something true about feeling stuck in this beautiful valley. In 2017 we took our last family trip to the US and Canada, a wonderful whirl of camping and visiting family. In 2018 we took our last family trip to India. Before this, there were travels nearly every single year. India, Nepal, Turkey, here in Thailand of course, Canada, the US, Israel. We were travelers.

We still are, inside. But that was the last time we traveled farther than the south of Thailand. (I took a short trip in 2019 to sell our van, an anxiety-ridden blip that taught me I can do hard things, but I don’t count it as an actual visit.)

We have lived a rich traveling life. Is it over? Is it meant to be over? Lately I feel like I am in pieces, scattered and floating. I come to this blog again, to still the storm inside and to dream of a journey.

But it feels hard to dream, post-pandemic. (Mid-pandemic?) It feels like a practical joke, like the rug might be pulled out from under us if we try to make plans. Is this what I’m feeling now? The lack of ability to see the future? Is this what is drawing my molecules apart?

I have always had a hard time seeing the shape of the world. I’m better in the particulars, the curve of a tree, the feeling of a small hand in mine. Now, seventeen years after I started this blog, I am thinking about how to celebrate my twenty-year-old son’s birthday. My fourth child is turning fourteen in a week. Things have changed and stayed the same. I can’t see the future because my children will leave and I don’t know how to foresee that.

Writing about it is different, too. The richness of living with older children is like eating one of those really chocolatey chocolatey cakes. They are full of their own ideas. Talks are deep. Things are sometimes private and harder to write about. There is a lot of cuteness, but they don’t always want me to share it. They are not toddlers anymore.

I found relief in writing for so long. Writing helped the big truths feel more true. But over the last few years, some of the underpinnings of who I thought I was unraveled, and I have felt a little like I might unravel, too.

This is not so much about faith. I actually find that my faith is very similar to what it was when I was a child, when I was immersed in a celebratory, musical tradition that was bathed in the Holy Spirit and all about the twin disciplines of experience and compassion.

I am different now, more contemplative for sure. Not so much into hype. But when I look back, I see a familiar shape of faith. When people in my life have deconstructed and thought about, for example, hatred for their bodies, I have thought, I don’t think we were taught that. How could we have hated our bodies when we were taught to dance in the aisles? We didn’t, that’s all there is. I didn’t. That’s just one example.

(And I was taught that I could bring all my friends to dance in the aisles of my churches. That is what we did. It’s what I still do, in a way, though my church is a garden, now.)

So, no, it is not faith that has unraveled, or not in God, anyway. Maybe it is my faith in people. I think the unraveling has had something to do with my beliefs about how we change the world.

I thought if people simply had things written well for them, they would have epiphanies and revelations. Love, as well as knowledge, would change everything. So my writing had all this hope attached to it.

Knowledge and love do change things, but maybe on a smaller scale. I see that mostly I write for myself, and hopefully it helps someone else, too. Every single prayer, poem, story I write addresses some kind of need I have: to see the world’s shape, to see truth’s shape. I can’t go without writing for long before it all becomes nebulous and airy. And love? Well, love is powerful, but it cannot control. There we go, there is the truth that I avoided. I have loved and loved, I have thought I could make everything more loving and then people would stay put, relationships would stay intact, but nothing can make us into puppets because God created us to be free. That means we get to make decisions that may hurt one another. Free decisions.

Since I started this blog, I have uncovered many things in myself that were covered by my own ignorance. First there was the discovery of anxiety, and then the discovery of what lay behind that, autism. Then the awareness that this writing, this shaping and obsession with words and ideas, colors and lines and stories and poems, is a part of autism. A good part of autism. The other parts, the hard parts, are dogged and sometimes mean to me. That is okay. It is all just part of it.

Another thing I have uncovered is the complexity of being neurodiverse in a neurodiverse family. There is the dream, perhaps, and that dreamy dreaminess is real and true. And then there is the fact that all your obsessions and impulses and quirks and tapping and motions may just clash with one another at times. And those times will feel explosive. This is the most clearly I have written about this, I know. I don’t write about it a lot because it is a gentle and private place in our lives. But it bears saying here.

So this space is the same. Is it the same? How can it be the same after all this time? I feel both frustrated and encouraged by that.

Same old Rae. No toddlers, though.

Bear with me. I may have to do quite a lot of writing to piece myself back together.