Here we are. My son and I, just the two of us. No family within hundreds of miles. We are making it, and not just surviving, but happy and thriving!
Though I have been partnered in his young life, I never stopped what I needed to do to make sure he had community and I had community. This would be through daycare and friends with or without kids, and most recently our church. I have made a strong effort to sustain the relationships that I want to nurture well into adulthood for myself and for him.
For the longest time, I was always trying to attach myself to other peoples lives, or would welcome their invitation to be something like “extended family”. Then, I had an epiphany. This epiphany that I had made me realize how much I love community, but how much separated community is important to me too and how I now see community and family. I have always been a community builder, introducing friends to other friends, establishing meetup groups, organizing gatherings with groups, so on so forth. Its the social butterfly in me. However, I noticed that it can get messy trying to pocket all that community into one and in some instances became resentful of feeling used. For some context, when it was just me, I would always get the “aww poor you, spending the holidays alone, come be with our family”, as if I wasn’t enough on my own or as if it was unacceptable to be alone when you were alone. It was as if I was an orphan and people felt like they needed to save me, or I was giving off “lost child energy”; they felt bad for me and over time I began to feel bad for myself. This had been my existence since I was a child, “being alone is not good, find belonging”.
Through various means, I made sure to never be alone whether I was a cheerleader, dancer, etc. I was very independent as soon as I reached adulthood, bought a condo alone, lived alone and had no problem becoming self-sufficient, but this nagging idea was that because I didn’t have “family” in the sense of the traditional nuclear family or cousins local, I needed to have a wide network. So that followed me throughout my life. Then I ended up a single mother and realized how toxic it was to think me or my son are not enough alone, together. As if, we needed to spend holidays with a large family, as if we needed to have aunts, uncles, and grandmas or we were different. Now, it is beautiful that so many have this, but that was not my experience growing up. I never want him to feel like he is not enough, or we are not enough and that we have to attach ourselves to others during the meaningful times.
The holidays, birthdays and things like that. Those things are done beautifully communally, but have as much beauty shared intimately. Intimacy is something I missed growing up. “Intimacy is the glue that strengthens family bonds.” I didn’t have an intimate space growing up in the home so I shared intimacy everywhere outside of the home and as I got older, that proved itself to be extremely faulty.
“Intimacy is hard to define, but we all know when we’re feeling it. Whether it’s snuggling in companionable silence with your partner or crying on your best friend’s shoulder, intimacy is when we feel connected.” Read more here on how to establish intimacy in the home.
I feel grateful to have unearthed what was iggin me my whole life and to have the opportunity to course correct for my sons sake and mine too. This silence that I’ve had as of late made me realize the intimate relationship I needed to have was with myself and with God. To also be a mother that could have an intimate bond with her son. As an intellectual I couldn’t understand (nor was I meant to) what it was like having a relationship that surpasses human understanding connected to our divine source. It’s become abundantly clear though.
Finding my identity back in Christ gave me the assurance I needed to see that we are never really alone. All along, we had much much more and all of these thoughts, feelings and experiences led me to the acceptance that though the physical body might be alone, the spiritual one is always partnered. Our Heavenly Father is always there looking over us. Our neighbors, our friends and our community are always there. Though many of us fell on lonely times during the pandemic, I never allowed it to stop me from connecting with my community. If anything, once I came back to my community it made me feel like I had that much more gratitude for the people I care for in my life. This season has weeded out the ones that I have no business in company with, and for that I am grateful. I am one who stretches herself to limit when it comes to connecting, but I do so because I feel that is what I am called to do.
Having that desire to connect does not always have to come with a partner, that’s an added benefit though. The root of all of this pain I was facing has been unearthed by allowing myself to fully grieve that we will not have the dynamic many nuclear families begin with. However, I have so much peace knowing the ending is still being written, we are never truly alone and even when we are physically, that is more than okay.
