It happens in relation

The friend was at the door at 11am and I was ready to take the little lorazepam pill so it could soften the edges of the day, because the day had one focus and that was on my root canal redo. Oh yes. Not just a root canal, a redo, because after two years the canal was infected.

I had woken up bright and early to feed Delphi, clean the house and drive the pup to doggy daycare, because good news, the CT scan showed nothing wrong! She had been limping but because she had two months to rest prior to the surgery, it seems whatever was bothering her healed. Rest works miracles, doesn’t it? We know as perimenopause and menopause women, yes!

I know you love Delphi, Phi-fi, Little Monster as much as we do so let me tell you what happened.

The morning before, we had driven an hour to the specialist. There were x-rays from a few months ago that had suggested something was there, something in the bones or the ligaments that would need an arthroscopy and eight weeks of recovery on the other side of it. So we went in for a CAT scan first, the kind of scan that lets the surgeon see exactly where to enter.

And I had spent the week planning. As a fur baby momma, I plan! I plan the shit out of recovery time and how I was going to work and be there for her. I had figured out how she would stay still through the recovery, how I would lift her and carry her, how I would feed her, how I would arrange the house so that her bed and her water and her quiet corner were all on the same level, how I would soften every part of the eight weeks ahead so they would be loving and easeful and slow. I had become the Caregiver in advance…on hyper, max mode.

The doctor called me a couple of hours later. The scan was clear and nothing was wrong. Delphi could come home, and she could resume her life, and unless something began to show, lameness or limping, we could simply go back to the rhythm we had been in before.

I was about to have my lunch, Thai, an hour away when I heard this. I sat there for a moment, before I went back in to get her. Yet another hour drive. I drove four hours that day.

It is a strange thing to grieve a future you had prepared for that will now not arrive. I drove the hour back home and the inside of my head was quiet in a way I had not expected.

I had thought I would be relieved, and I was, and I was also a little undone.

A whole landscape of careful planning had been laid down inside me, and the landscape had been built for a season that no longer existed.

I had to pause, and almost mourn the preparation, and feel my way back to what the actual next rhythm was supposed to be.

Or, more honestly, to ask whether I had the freedom now to set a different rhythm entirely, one that did not look like the old one and did not look like the eight weeks I had built, but some third thing I had not seen yet.

The next day, the friend was at the door.

I had a root canal years ago and it had quietly cracked or gotten infected somewhere along the way, which meant an endodontist, a word I had not really heard before that week. I have a real fear of dental work, the kind that lives in the body more than the head, so I took the lorazepam an hour before, and my friend came to pick me up, because the medication meant I should not drive. She drove me to the appointment, and she waited the entire two hours.

Liz then drove me home, and we stopped for ice cream on the way, and we laughed, and we sat at the farm table for a minute longer than we needed to, and she made sure I got safely inside the house before she left. I went straight to bed at three in the afternoon. I got up around eight for a small dinner. I went right back to sleep.

You think my dental saga ended there but it doesn’t, my friend. I have to go back for round two of my treatment and then to the dentist for some additional dental work prior to getting Invisalign. Let me know if you have any Invisalign tips.

I have been sitting with the throughline of the two days.

Sometimes the thing you have prepared for does not arrive, and sometimes the thing you have feared happens anyway, and your body needs a friend at the door and a long sleep and the unexpected gift of delicious ice cream on a Friday afternoon.

There are scary things and there is support and there is rest and there is, in between, more joy than the original schedule had allowed for. I am in a place this week of feeling alive about what is possible for June. It has been a sight reset, the kind I did not put on the calendar.

And the line I keep coming back to is this. Your dreams, and your love, and your being of service, and the identity shift you are quietly in the middle of, all of it can occur. And for every part of it, it happens in relation. I do not mean verbal feedback. I do not mean someone telling you what they think of you. I mean being in life with other people, and being witnessed by them, and letting yourself be picked up at the door, and letting yourself laugh in the car on the way home while being incredibly loopy.

I have been inviting women to be interviewed for the new Sacred Strategy season, and listening to a novel called The Wedding People in which the protagonist slowly becomes a viewer of her own life and learns to speak honestly because she has finally let someone hear her, and to Mrs. Harris Goes to Paris, a film where a woman begins to listen to her own signs and then to speak for herself, and then, almost as a natural consequence, to speak for others. Beauty and dreams hold a place in her, without taking over her reality. The throughline is the same in every one of them. A woman does not become the next version of herself by herself. She becomes it in the rooms she dares to be in.

I think this is the part the planning part of me does not always remember. I can lay down eight weeks of careful preparation on a Tuesday morning, and I can build the rhythm I think comes next, and the next rhythm will still surprise me, and it will mostly come through other people. Through the friend at the door. Through the women I will be interviewing. Through the room I have been quietly building.

Speaking of which.

The next container I have been building is opening its door in August. It is called LUSH Business Academy, and it is a six month room for the woman who has been collecting ingredients and is ready to lead one offer instead of more. If you have been reading these letters and felt something pointing somewhere, you can wait at the door with me here.

xoxo,