Simmering

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We were all surprised, I think, that it took so long for it to set in for me: the rage.

After all, that had been my default emotion for much of my life, my signature. (My friends in college once apparently took bets on how many holes in mini golf it would take for me to throw my club in frustration. Two. It took two holes.)

But after Alana died, I was so lost and broken that I just didn’t have it in me to be angry. I didn’t have the strength. I was just so empty. So spent.

I could see how cruel it was, the hand my daughter and I had been dealt. How unfair. But I just didn’t feel that injustice the way I always had, even over trivial things. This was the least trivial of things, and yet, the outrage didn’t boil up inside me the way I would have expected…

…at first.

But then, slowly, as my bruised and bleeding heart started to heal, it started to peek its head out every now and again. And then when I got pregnant once more – when again I had something to lose – it came roaring back with a vengeance.

For a long while it wasn’t very consistent. After all, it takes energy to rage, and energy is in short supply with grief relentlessly sapping your will to live. 

But when it did happen, it came in thundering waves, a tsunami of keening indignation.

When it happened, I could feel it settling over me, almost like a physical thing. I could feel it clawing at me, dragging me down, smothering any optimism or lightness I might have temporarily grasped. It would sneak up behind me and slip its hands over my eyes, but instead of releasing me with a cheery “surprise!” those hands just clenched harder and harder, grew bigger and bigger, squeezed tighter and tighter until they covered my ears, my nose, my mouth, the fury and misery and envy blinding, deafening, suffocating, until it was the only thing left, the very air I breathed, the blood in my veins.

I kept fantasizing about destroying something. I wanted to HIT. I wanted to SCREAM and WAIL and CURSE and RIP SOMETHING APART.

Instead, I cried and cried and cried until I shook, because my rage was so powerful, so all-consuming, I knew that if I released it as my body was calling for, I would scare my cat, or my husband, or the neighbors, or whatever innocent wildlife happened to scurry into my path. I felt like there was nowhere I could go to mourn her how she deserved: violently.

So instead, it chewed me apart from the inside.

And then, I’d get tired again. And the grief would stroke the monster soothingly until it curled back down to sleep. And I’d settle in once again to the all-consuming despair.

And that was how it went, for several long years.

But not anymore.

Now, my rage sits beside me, a loyal and trusted friend. Now, I reach down lovingly to stroke its broad head, run my fingers through its thick fur, breathe in the raw scent of its power. I take comfort in the knowledge that this beast is potent, it is fierce, and it is absolutely ruthless.

This beast does not scare me – but it should scare them.

Because my beast is just one of many, one of millions. And together, we are learning to harness them. We are feeding them the love we carry for our children, to give them strength, to sustain them. We are teaching them to snarl and roar, to give voice to our pain.

We are teaching them to fight.

Because our beasts are love. And our beasts are change. And we will not go quietly.

What is your beast up to these days?