“This is so delicious, Mommy, do you want to try some?”
She looks at me expectantly, her lips a smeared kiss of blueberry. Her eyes are alight with the surprise of a breakfast date, just us, and her whole self is in delight at the muffin she’s munching on.
It is such an innocent question, one that beckons me to share in her degustatory pleasure. Beyond the deliciousness of the muffin, what my child is inviting me to partake in is her experience of joy.
My heart skips a beat.
I know that I have but a few moments to answer her, to obviously share in her delight. It is just a muffin, after all, isn’t it? On most days, I happily take the bite, without thinking about it again, and share in the joy of this now. Today, though, I am momentarily pulled away from this now. I feel the tingle of the trigger sliding down from my brain, and activating my nervous system, one cell at a time. The cortisol floods my bloodstream, the muscles around my neck and shoulders tighten, and in the split second before I can answer my daughter, I hear this message — RUN.
The message is incongruous with the “now” that I am in. In this now, I am sitting across from my child, who in this moment, radiates from a deep well of beauty. My body feels alight with deep love and gratitude for her existence. It is a “now” that I feel often with both of my children — a deep sense of grace at their presence, their choosing me to nurture them towards their soul purpose. It is a good “now” — and yet, in this split second I have to answer her question, this new “now” within the bigger “now”, I am being haunted by ghosts. These are the ghosts of thousands of moments over the span or almost two decades where I heard the whispers of “can’t get better”, “not good enough”, “this is it for you”
Even deeper into recovery with each year — day — minute — I am never more than a second away from being right where I was in the depths of illness, where the simple act of eating a meal — let alone a treat — was a daunting, frustrating, and terrifying task.
In the span of this half second, where my child is holding out a miniscule piece of muffin for me, anticipation alive in her face, I am living through two decades of illness as my body recognizes, processes, and decides upon the triggered ghost. Why now? Why in this “now” that was so peaceful and filled with joy? The ghost knows when to strike -when I am most likely to enjoy without remembering, when I am most likely to believe that I am free. The ghost comes in, and tries to take me back to the “before”- and if I let it, if I allow myself to be guided by the ethereal hand, I end up reviving mechanisms that I thought I was using to keep me alive, but really were slowly draining my soul from me with each time. The “ghost” tries to take the love that swells within my body for my child and feed from it.
Even in the most normal moments of life, we never know what may be brewing beneath the surface — first of all for ourselves, but even less so for those that sit across from us.
How do we really know whether those we are with are in the “now” with us, or whether there are ghosts haunting them, and taking them into their “before”s or their “after”s? The truth is, we really do not. It becomes increasingly more difficult to remain in our now, when there is so much to ruminate about in the before, and in the after. When someone’s eyes water, are they truly moved by something we have said, or are they deep in a memory — or a fear?
So, you’re wondering, did I take the muffin?
What I first took was a deep breath. When we panic, we panic on an inhale — a sharp intake of breath that fills us with fear and opens our eyes wide to take in the stressor around us. What are we running or hiding from? What are we fighting? For our ancestors, that may have been a physical predator — a jaguar maybe — and as women, particularly, we evolved to fight to protect our young at all costs. This adrenaline was pumping through my body as my young offered me a muffin, and my body, haunted, thought this muffin was jaguar.
A deep breath in, and an even longer, deeper breath out. When I exhale longer than the inhale, my body relaxes. I am telling my nervous system that I have time to breathe out properly, that I am safe. The ghost gets blown away into the wind, incapable of withstanding my elongated, steady exhale. Thankfully, I have 10 years of breathing deeply now to fall back on, breaths that I started taking even while ghosts set up shop throughout my body. Slowly, painfully, with many steps up and down along the way, deeper breaths meant fewer ghosts. Today, this morning, now — I am no longer triggered, now, after one deep breath.
“Sure, I’d love to try the muffin.”
And I did. And it was, indeed, delicious.
