Letting Everything Be, Just As It Is

This month, I will only have my kids for 11 days. Between Father’s Day and a trip their dad is taking with them at the end of the month, I lose all my weekends and a whole 10 days I’d normally have with them. At first, I was furious. Feeling I was entitled to those days, I thought about how I could scramble to get back one or two of them from him. And yet, I knew I wasn’t—our agreement allows for us both to have special holidays and vacations with our kids, something from which we both benefit. But in that instant, I was pissed. Mad at him for taking so many weekends away from me in what felt like a deliberate attempt to isolate me, mad at the entire institution of divorce that creates agreements that don’t allow for a generous and even flow to kids’ lives, and mad at myself, somehow, for creating an agreement that doesn’t prevent something like this from happening to me. Of course, none of these things, not even my ex, were to blame; this is the nature of divorced life. But sometimes making peace with that fact takes some doing. Instinctually, I want to protect and defend what’s mine, when deep down I know that sometimes there’s nothing to do but accept things just as they are.

Now seasoned at this kind of reaction, I spent a little time with that anger and watched as it quickly turned to disappointment, then to loss, and I realized that, as all great teachers teach, my anger was just overshadowing the deep sadness I was feeling over my situation. I talk a lot about sadness in divorce. There are many layers to the grief I and other divorced parents feel when we are separated from our kids because we couldn’t live with their other parent. In a high-conflict divorce, that grief takes on other emotions like powerlessness and hopelessness. Since we also cannot safely or productively communicate with that other parent, we are reduced to an aloneness in our parenting that feels even more sad. This week, I’ve found myself experiencing a pre-emptive grief, facing the hard fact that sometimes divorce simply isn’t fair.

This morning, I sat with a guided meditation from the great teacher and Buddhist psychologist Tara Brach. Her wonderful podcast offers both teachings and meditations with titles like, “Allowing What Is,” and “Relaxing into the Flow.” Today, as we did our gentle body scan, she said something I can safely say she repeats in every meditation but somehow it hit different this time: Let everything be just as it is. In that moment, I could feel the squeezing in my heart release a little. I remembered that every situation, whether I like it or not, whether it hurts or is hard, is an opportunity to feel deeply everything that comes along with being part of this human experience. It didn’t actually matter whether my ex was out to get me, or that divorce was systematically unfair, or that I had screwed up, the truth of what I was feeling was this: I had very little time all month with my kids and there was nothing I could really do about it, and I felt heartbroken over it. I had to let my despair, my longing for more time, and the little hole that their absence would leave, just be there.

The thing about it is, when we let ourselves feel our feelings, like, really let them be there just as they are, then we’re able to move out of our anger, our righteousness, our victimhood. Allowing things to be just as they are doesn’t mean we roll over and let people abuse or take advantage of us. But it does mean that when those things happen, we let the feelings that arise for us be there, by leaning into (rather than away from) them, by holding them with compassion, and learning from them. Then, our responses to those kinds of situations arise naturally, out of a place in us that knows what we need because we understand what we feel. We can act with confidence and clarity because we’ve first taken the time to briefly move away from the knee-jerk reaction, the historic pattern, and even the trauma response, turning instead toward what’s real for us right now. It’s a very different place then feeling justified in arguing with someone over something we think we need when really, maybe, we don’t.

It takes time in divorce to come to a place of allowing. It’s not easy to accept the hard feelings that come with the loneliness, the loss of control, and certainly in some situations, the ongoing conflict. But we never know how to respond when we’re reacting to the feelings that come up on a near-daily basis. We have to learn to tend to our feelings for ourselves first by allowing what is so that we can slow down, figure out what’s really going on, and come to a logical place of action from there. In the case of my June, once I accessed what was underneath my feelings of blame, of being bullied, I realized that in this situation, there was nothing to do. There was no stone I could throw; no battle I could enter that would make me feel better. In the end, what made me feel better was knowing that June was just going to be like this and that, without trying to change it, I was allowed to feel exactly how I felt about it.