Last week, I had a big cry. It’s been a long year of serious things, all demanding that I stay in complete control, and create infinite softness for the people around me to be as intense as they need to be. The weight is not too much—it never is—but I had started having trouble finding the life spark. I’d suppressed my fire for so long that the pilot light went out. The spirit graciously generated patience, help, encouragement, and goodness—but no joy. No energy. I was feeling like a soft, receptive, flexible shell with no guts.
So I decided we needed to go to Six Flags. I needed to ride a rollercoaster.
I’m not a theme park person. At all. I hate crowds, I hate gimmicks, I hate exiting through the gift shop. But I do love rollercoasters. I love them the way I love bungee jumping and cliff jumping and jumping out of trees into rivers and skiing and skating and driving fast. Friends convinced us to go to Six Flags last year, and it turned out to be one of the most restful, happy days we’d all had together, maybe ever, because it turns out we all love rollercoasters. As I am suspended upside down, or plummeting straight toward the ground, I cannot repress my smile. I don’t scream (unless it’s to entertain my offspring seat-mate). I grin, because this is how I like to feel—like I’m on a ride, not in control.
I want to feel big things, and rollercoasters are designed to make you feel big things. They activate the primal parts of your brain that keep you from falling off cliffs. The parts I live to override, because on the other side of “CAUTION” there is ecstasy, a side of life that has to bump shoulders with death. And that’s ultimately what I think I want — I want intensity so big and immersive that my own frenetic brain might as well be lying still.
It’s tempting to see thrill seekers as fun people. But I’m actually not that fun. I’m not the first one on the dance floor. It takes a LOT of alcohol to get me to the karaoke stage. I don’t play video games or beach volleyball. I am not carefree, or laid back, or light hearted, or easy going.
It takes a lot for me to lose myself or to enter a state of flow. To feel as though I am being carried along by something, rather than powering it off my own fuel supply. That’s why I like jumping off things—because I love gravity. I like rollercoasters because they carry me along without effort. I like infatuations that consume me despite my best efforts to concentrate. I like a conversational flow where every participant converges, creating a whole greater than the sum of its parts. I think this is why I’m attracted to things like magic and God and psychedelics. Because I’m longing to set myself down for a moment and feel the pull of something bigger.
Somehow activating my amygdala’s YOU ARE GOING TO DIE response is the only way for me to circumvent my frontal lobe’s KEEP EVERYONE HAPPY goals. What my therapist would call “threat” and “reward” in my parasympathetic nervous system are, for me, permanently entangled. I get anxious when I’m too happy, and euphoric when I’m falling off a cliff.
But my love of big feelings has had to modify a bit to accommodate the big feelings of my children. The needs are bottomless. The emotions are unfiltered. The stakes feel always and eternally high. But all of that intensity seems to require someone who can absorb, not amplify, it. My kids need someone steady, flexible, and at ease so that they can ground their own volatile, rigid, and roiled moments. Kids cannot handle adult levels of intensity, so I am constantly trying to decrease my own volume, pungency, and luminous flux.
Sometimes my instincts get the job done. I was playing yard football with Asa, and he was getting frustrated, because I wasn’t *really* trying to beat him. He wanted me to hit hard, run fast, and not ask him if he was okay when he grabbed his nose and screamed. He really didn’t want me to smile at him or tell him “good job.”
“I want an opponent, not a MOM!” he yelled.
“I’m sorry, love, I can’t do that. I’m your mom always.”
He stormed off and sulked. Finally I agreed to play for real. With utmost intensity. (I gave him about 60 percent, and no smiles.)
The game with his non-mom opponent lasted three minutes before he said, unnerved, “I really want you to smile again.”
My kids are so used to having a soft place to land that they cannot recognize their need for it, and yet become completely disoriented without it. Asa can’t see the connection between the ever-presence of nurture and his desire for bigger, tougher challenges, but I can. I’m not smothering him, I want him to go get the wind knocked out of him. Just not by me. That’s not my role. He’s an intense kid in an intense world, and it’s my job to make room for that. I don’t always do it well, but I’m learning.
I treasure that role, and really value the new skill of learning to be an axis instead of a cosine curve, or the candle instead of the bonfire. It’s required nonstop spiritual growth, because I have to learn how to feel alive without standing on the bow the ship, screaming “come and get me” at the squall. By nature, I want my joy to be euphoric. I want my sadness to gut me. I don’t want to vent, I want to rage. I want work to be fulfilling. I want love to be transcendent ALWAYS. There’s not space for all that when the kids are rioting or whinging or in need of co-regulation. So we have to learn to be moved by more gentle energies.
I fell for the narrative that true maturity meant being content with something more bland, more compromised, more dull, all in the name of stability. But that’s not the only way to grow up. In fact, that narrative often serves the creation of drones to keep the cogs of business- and politics- and power-as-usual turning.
Maturity, as I am learning to understand it, is the ability to see love in its subtleties. To be able to modulate in the service of others, and as part of big, bold, intense goals. Maturity knows when to go big and when to go home—and sees both as success. Yes, sometimes instincts and age make this feel natural. Sometimes the fine tuning of the spirit is so deeply satisfying, I wonder how I ever endured the ticker tape parades of my own big feelings. Sometimes I can bask in flickers I would never have seen. But there are still times that it is a a slow and painful rebirth — less like I’m being involuntarily expelled into a new life, and more like a baby bird growing strong by pecking my way out of the shell. Building muscles as I’m being reborn.
There are moments when my new muscles aren’t enough and I fully just lose my shit at my kids, not because what they are doing is so horrible, but because I cannot absorb anymore. My softness has bumped up against my molten core. I have been the mitigating factor, the peacemaker, the arbitrator, the fulcrum all day long, and at some point the full intensity of my desire for someone to just go a long with the motherfucking plan that I meticulously and painstakingly plotted out…results in a scream. I’ve stopped this for the most part (therapy! muscle building!), but it happens every now and then. It happens when I run out of buckets of water to keep the fire small.
There are other times when the smallness of the fire, the shallowness of the sea, the gentleness of the breeze make me feel empty. Not tender and pliant, but brittle and lethargic. Being soft and gentle requires energy, and those high voltage energy sources are inaccessible.
All thoughts are now interruptible.
Skiing, skating, and traveling with kids is slow and difficult.
Driving kids is about safety and sanity while they play the same song 70 times and bicker and tell you to turn around a look at stuff.
Romance, once you have kids, gets very discrete and discreet. Nobody in this phase of life is going to stay up with you until 2 am and talk about life and God and the yearning of your soul.
You have to find somewhere to stash them if you want to jump off a thing. Because that’s another major shift. Kids change your relationship to risk. They lack the skills and judgment to stay safe much of the time. I love a thrill, but I’m not reckless. I want to know that everyone involved is competent enough to survive, and my kids are, in general, not quiiiiiiiite as competent as they are adventurous and curious, though the gap is closing quickly. But it’s my job to do some of that risk-assessment for them, and I’m famously not great at risk-assessment for myself.
That’s why we love rollercoasters. If I’m going to put my children’s life in anyone’s hands, it’s definitely going to be someone in a STEM field.
After a recent trip to Six Flags, we got home and Lewis realized he’d left his water bottle in a gift shop. I had other errands to run, so I went back for the bottle. It was there, right where he left it, and I was about to walk back to the car when I decided that the lost bottle was God’s way of delivering an extra dose of the medicine I’d self-prescribed. So I went and rode a rollercoaster all by myself. It was one of those where your feet dangle in the air and you hang from the track. It looped and twisted and sped and for about 90 glorious seconds, while I happily surrendered. I could briefly match pitch with the universe, and my intensity felt weightless.