Author Archives: Mary Ann

february funk

T.S. Eliot says that April is the cruelest month. I think February is. I always go into a deep funk in February. Lest you think it’s self-fulfilling prophecy, I will tell you that the funk happens, and it is often not until I am well into it before I realize that it’s February. Last week I fell into a funk totally out of proportion to my life’s circumstances. Today I had one of those V-8 commercial slaps to the forehead realizations: It’s February.

Note, too, that I am not the only one who has noticed the February phenomenon. I’ve learned from friends and family that they experience it, too. I used to think it had something to do with the seasons; I believe in SAD—seasonal affective disorder—and would probably be gobbling Prozac if I still lived in my grey, wintery hometown. But I live in Florida where there is almost always sunshine. So it’s not the grey skies that are getting to me.

It seems I always carry at least a little melancholy around like a handbag. It  just tends to grow into a carry-on suitcase in February. They want you to take pills and escape your depression. And I am not Tom Cruise-like against that. When thoughts get darkly overwhelming and grow to the size of a steamer trunk, it’s time to get help with carrying the load instead of trying to lug it around by yourself.

I used to try to push depression away. Try to, anyway. It has a mind of it’s own, though, and sometimes it stubbornly refuses to budge. But look around. To some degree depression is a natural response to the state of the world, isn’t it? Is it desirable to escape from or push away such an authentic response? There must be another answer.

A recent scientific study showed  that Middle Aged Misery Spans the Globe and that at my age, my moods should be on the upswing. In this particular February, I am not straining as hard to escape the funk or push it away. Instead, I am trying to listen to what it’s telling me about the world, about my life. I am trying to use it as a tool for transformation rather than something to fear. I am trying to use it as a catalyst rather than something that  should be suppressed. And I suspect that’s why I don’t feel quite so flattened by it.

 Still, whoever decided February should be the shortest month of the year was pretty darn wise.

trying to levitate

My Favorite Son (MFS), now in college, was 11 years old when I asked him to help me imagine his day at school. He cooperated by describing it in chronological order and in plodding detail, just I suppose, to be funny, and probably to evade telling me anything really important about his increasingly private life. But I listened as he told about getting on the bus, finding a seat, the various bus stops, and I didn’t interrupt him until he got to homeroom and morning announcements and then the designated “moment of silence.”

We are, MFS and I, spiritual beings. (He may not know this about himself, even yet, but I have always known it about him.) But we have no formal religion, and I suspected he did not use this time for formal prayer.

So I asked him, “What do you do during the moment of silence?”

He answered, “I try to levitate.”

And we laughed. We burst into deep, joyous laughter, the belly laugh kind, the only proper response, come to think of it.

I love that MFS wasn’t bound by limitations. For him there was no line between what is possible and impossible. For him it was all possible—unlike his mother’s life at that particular time. For me there was a line. Actually, it was more like a big thick wall layered with miles of barbed wire and surrounded by a crocodile-filled moat. “Possible” was on the other side of all that while I stood bound to “impossible.”

Filled with fear accumulated during more than 25 years away from the academic world, I had just returned to college to finally complete a degree. At the same time, I was struggling in my marriage, or closer to the truth, struggling with myself, and struggling with my loud inner critic and a cast of assorted demons. The short version of my sad tale is that my spirit was crushed, almost extinguished, from the cumulative effect of a life-long unrequited desire for an undefined “something missing” and discomfort in the world.I felt certifiably crazy, and it was usually easy to find someone close by who would affirm the opinion I held of myself.

Soon I would walk a bridge over the moat, and real-world guardian angels would point to a ladder and wire clippers. Soon I would find out that my kind of crazy is okay. And that my undefined desire was simply a desire for making meaning in the world. A desire shared by many creative people and inextricably connected to spirituality. On this day, however, here at the dinner table, talking to MFS, I couldn’t even imagine such a transformation. My fears had blinded me, and my inner critic scolded me, “What you want is impossible. And you are crazy to want it.”

But I had more spirit remaining than I gave myself credit for then. And even though I remember this time of my life as a time of deep and overriding despair, I was, I know now, already taking action to lift myself up. Tentative. Tip toes. But I was, indeed, trying to levitate too.

When our laughter died down, I wondered aloud to MFS, “Levitate?”

Sometimes as a parent, I’ve felt moments of divine intervention. This was one of those moments, because I didn’t say what first came to my mind.

I didn’t tell him that what he was trying to do was impossible.

I didn’t show him the moat, the crocodiles, the wall, and the barbed wire that I knew so well.

Instead, I asked him, “Have you done it?”

I swear, magical light beamed from his eyes and shone on me when he answered, “No, not yet.”