bearing blog

This vacation rental has four bedrooms.  Mark and I are in one.  The 15yo has one.  The 8- and 12yos have one.  And our two grown boys, the recent college graduate and the one who will be moving to college in the fall, have one.  This is basically the same arrangement in our house at home, at least in theory; but in practice it’s probably only been a handful of times, for the youngest was still sleeping in our bed quite a lot when the oldest went away to college.

This is our third time in Chamonix as a family, after 5 years and the most intense parts of a global pandemic.  The 15yo now has free roam of the entire walkable town, and the 12yo is learning his way around and so his “boundaries” are increasing.  The 18yo can buy himself a drink in a bar.   

Jet lag has not been kind to the 15yo, who has been plagued by unrestful sleep for many months; there is still no diagnosis, but we are trying some medications with the help of a pediatric sleep clinic.  We let them sleep as much as they wanted for the first couple of days—all of them—and everyone has adjusted except the 15yo.    Today we will try an 11 am wakeup and see if the sleep schedule can be improved, but no one really thinks that the unrestfulness will be.  So that has been hard for the 15yo.

I don’t know quite what to do with other people’s unhappiness, of the kind that goes on and on and rarely lifts.  “Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep”:  it is good advice for temporary connections and for temporary weeping; but what to do when one lives, all the time, with someone who is suffering?  And at the same time with others who are not, who are even rejoicing most of the time?  I have not learned the trick of rejoicing and weeping and rejoicing again in quick succession, day after day for a year or more.   I have not learned the trick of rejoicing and weeping at the same time, because I am together in one house with one who rejoices and also one who weeps, as well as some other people, and they are getting on each other’s nerves.  Cultivating a serene acceptance, would perhaps be easier.  But detachment, which is the only way that I know to achieve serenity, succeeds exactly because it fails to be “with” anyone.

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Perhaps “weep with those who weep” was never meant to encompass clinical depression.

I don’t mean that we cannot com-passion-ate, suffer with, someone whose particular sorrow is depression.  I mean, there are two kinds of sorrow there:   the disordered sorrow, the moments of believing the lies that depression tells; and then there is ordered sorrow in the face of depression, the simple wishing that  depression wasn’t there, the longing for what it has thieved away, the unrequited desire to feel better, the weariness of trying one remedy after another, of working through therapies that are, well, work.

I think it must be that “weep with those who weep” means to accompany the sufferer in the latter grief, but not to fall somehow into the disordered thinking and feeling itself.  Or to mistake one for the other.   Clinical depression is an illness manifesting as a collection of unreasonable emotions; and yet it is entirely reasonable to have emotions about the depression.  The former is what therapy works to challenge by deliberate effort of will and behavior; the latter are valid and what therapy works to accept and process.  And yet the two resemble each other; a twisted cord to be unbraided gently.

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The other difficulty, of somehow accompanying the rejoicing and the weeping at the same time, I don’t have an answer for yet.  I hold back from rejoicing for fear of abandoning the one who weeps, and restrain my weeping for fear of deflating the one who rejoices.   Is the answer to compassionate and rejoice interiorly, but keep a lid on it exteriorly?  or to learn to code-switch smoothly from one to the other and back?  or is this advice simply not well applied to the situation of simultaneity, and some other approach is needed?

A family means:  being with, really with, more than one person at a time.  Does that mean being more at one time?  It is hard to see how to be enough.  But logically I must be enough, already.

So instead of thinking of it being pulled in opposite directions, there must be a way forward, hand in hand on either side.