From here on out.
I have a lot of initials after my name. I joke that it means I know a whole lot about one thing and not much of anything about everything else.
I am a social worker. I rarely write about my work because I compartmentalize very well. It is what I am and who I am in so many ways, but it is also just “the job” and it’s a job best digested and then set aside, not rehashed for public consumption.
At this point I have spent more years than I can believe helping others. Or, as I teach my students, helping others to help themselves. It seems I’ve done it all, and yet I know that I am a beginner, a novice, light years from the talents and skills of those I am privileged to know and work alongside. I have listened and heard everything you could ever wish you hadn’t. I’ve listened to adults, couples, families. Men and women, boys and girls. I’ve sat on the couch and held the hands of adults as they struggled to find the words to articulate their pain, and I’ve sat in the sandbox with little ones too young to speak of horrors inflicted upon them.
It has been my privilege to be with people at the best moments of life, and at the worst. I have tried. I’ve talked people off the ledge and then called it a day. It is what I do. It is what I love.
Then today, while sitting in the carpool line waiting for my little one, I hit a link, to a website, something I do countless times throughout the day. I clicked, and there it was. A story about a mom, and a son, and how she’d lost him to Type One. I read a few lines and I stopped.
I couldn’t breathe. Truly couldn’t breathe.
Everything I know, everything I ‘ve ever said to all the people in my life left me. Panic? Anxiety? Terror? That’s what I help other people deal with. It’s not supposed to be mine.
I sat there in the carpool line. Seven cars back. Six minutes ’til pick up. And I cried. And cried and tried to find my breath and tried to figure out how to talk myself back
from the ledge.
And then I got a message, from a stranger who’s not one at all. A wonderful kind voice that said “are you okay?” She told me to breathe. She told me that I would be fine, that my little one would be fine.
Later I replied and told her that yes I was okay, that I had to be . I had to chauffeur to this activity and that. I had to be mommy. I had to go about life one step at a time.
I’ve always been very good at my work. I take a great deal of pride in what I do and especially how I do it. I realized today though, just how truly clueless I have been.
I sat on the sofas and in the hospital rooms and in the homes and listened, and said some ridiculously stupid words about something of which I knew nothing. What an absolute fool I have been.
But now I know.
Now I know what it feels like to stare over the ledge.
I know what if feels like to not be able to breathe.
My baby will not be that baby.
And I will tell myself that everyday for the rest of my life.
