gatekeeper of my heart
This morning what’s going through my head at 4:something is not love and acceptance, it’s a remake of how I’d live my life, how I would mother differently if I knew every possibility existed. Not just that I would never raise my voice or lose my patience, that I would teach him to meditate at four, that I would not make assumptions, that I would make nature a bigger part of our lives, that I would jog with him around the block, that I would sanctify sleep, that I would keep screens out of his bedroom and off before bedtime, that I would ask: what — Rose and Thorn, best and worst of every day. Every day when he’d been away at school and college? When he had friends and a girlfriend and seemed accepting of their breakup, of living in Covid with a house full of roommates and doing the things that students do, that he’d asked for help finding a therapist and I’d gone through a list with him, and he’d found another one on his own, asked how he should pay, would I pay for it — yes — yes bill me, that on his shelf when we went to pack his room at the Memorial his friends arranged wouldn’t be brand new Melatonin, Tums, along with a fresh bottle of shampoo and conditioner; this is where the mind goes: circling the drain, eye of the hurricane, woulda coulda shoulda: gone. And my chest feels clenched, there’s barely space there to breathe.
Take that breath. Take it in, air, give myself what he couldn’t give himself. Or maybe he could and did and still he’s gone.
The morning meditation, the one I’ve adapted from the free online version of T.M. I first started back in July, testing it out, I told myself, before I recommended it to my kids, their friends. What if I’d given him that: what if he’d had that? What if…. Sweet thing, poor him, poor you, shh: hush, hush. There-there, there-there. Hear the bird sing? The early bird? The five-note song in the powdery grey dawn. One long note, four fast: city bird, you miracle of a singing city bird. Stopping to listen: listen. What else, in the stillness, tea in my belly, oatmeal: gratitude, in the stillness, the refrigerator running — better go catch it! Who even makes that joke: George: was that you? Making me smile, then making me cry. You would never tell such a lame joke. But there you are, that field of energy I feel, all love, just love. It’s been nine months. I forgive you, I forgive you, I forgive you. The catch in my throat, the tears in my eyes. I forgive me, and everyone.
The time I had the tree cut down and it took two days, so you got home from school to a six foot trunk stripped of all its life and branches and you stood, hugging it, crying, sad and then angry at me. I never thought: what: sweetheart, as if I have control over you who are gone from this earth and still so present in my heart and mind and others too, all your friends who love you and miss you too: ha, am I trying to guilt you into coming back? Thank you for laughing at, with me. The clenched heart, the grieving heart.
You know I did a little journey with the hypnotherapist on Wednesday, and you were there, you and my father, on the path when I went to look for what keeps me from loving: the two of you, who took your love away and you’re never coming back. Counting from ten to one, to lo and behold there’s a gatekeeper: the gatekeeper to my heart and the trickster trying to tickle him and failing. And what are they protecting: my beating heart, red and fragile. The light energy before it was even me taking one look at that tender beating heart and building up a wall. No way to protect that but somehow it figured it out, this part of me came and stood guard, arms crossed, short cropped hair, unflagging. The gatekeeper’s not going anywhere. And the trickster: there as a diversionary force. It can distract anyone and anything but him, this team protecting my locked, walled-off heart. How does the hypnotherapist make peace of this little war: with kindness and understanding.
You know, George, I took you to her too, why? Not for stage fright. For stage fright that book we read together when you were ten after you flipped two pages instead of one on your second solo at the Holiday concert, and so angry at yourself stomped home in the dark while I drove alongside, saying it would be okay, but by April and the concert coming up with that dog-and-pony show of a solo, the repeating octave leap, that high note you have to hit full on from nowhere and let it hang in the air, you were anticipating disaster. I searched for therapists and found The Inner Game of Music, with its friendly stories and musical meditations, and it worked, you never had a problem after that in your five years-long soloist career, your treble voice hanging on longer than most, longer than you wanted, though you told me last year you’d never be as good at anything again. And shit, George, why didn’t I argue the hell out of that declaration.
You’re gone and I’m still here, hypnotherapy for this life of mine, this fragile tender unprotectable heart: that’s how we tend to this particular problem of the unconscious, the hypnotherapist and I: we allow the truth of it and the paradox. What happened in that recognition, and who was there to recognize? The innermost light, the energy that is life, going into hiding, innocent, all innocence, like the innocence of your anger, my father’s frustration, anyone, anywhere, who ever felt the loss of love, who took their love, the love that is life energy itself away and constructed a wall and placed a gatekeeper of protection, not knowing that wall would wall off all the love, the very first and last love, the love we have for ourselves. So we ask, she asks: can I be given access? Is it all right if you step aside for me, gatekeeper of my heart, seeing the play of things, the lay of things, the paradox of fragility and eternity; energy is immutable, energy needs no protection, it lights from within.
This is how we leave it, me, the hypnotherapist: the gatekeeper standing side-on, arms crossed, gate open, allowing me full access to my own heart. And the trickster, who has a new job, planting wildflowers — I’ve given him the job of wildflower planter.
They almost always get a new job, these parts of ourselves that came into being to protect us, to save our very lives it seemed at the time. What an old-school therapist would call a neurosis, what an American Buddhist would welcome into the cabin of our heart, like an old Western with an uncharacteristically inclusive ending. All welcome, the good, the bad, and the ugly, all welcome.
And is everything resolved? We look around, me with my eyes closed in the room with the curtains drawn, the hypnotherapist in my headphones, and find nothing lacking, nothing lurking, the tender heart doing its pulsing birth-to-death job, the light of energy someone else might call God, the Universe, present alongside the illusion that is time. She counts me back, remembering everything there is to remember and forgetting everything there is to forget, into the room, eyes open, and every day for the next ten days I’m to put my hand on my heart and walk past the gatekeeper and the wildflower gardener to the place inside my heart where love resides, love, pure love, the only love there really is no matter who is here and who is gone.
