Waiting Rooms

The Metaphysical Metamorphosis of Limbo

Waiting rooms are usually the primary domain of doctor’s offices. But I have found strange stretches of time in my life in which I seem to exit one waiting room only to find myself in another. I know from experience there is the legitimate danger that I become trapped.

Not by the waiting rooms themselves. Designating them as such is merely a mental construct, but the more time I spend waiting, the more the waiting becomes a lifestyle rather than a transitional coping mechanism. This is dangerous.

Luckily, when I finally realize that’s where I am, I know how to get out.

The best trajectory out of waiting– is flow

There is nothing better than when ideas flow, writing flows, parenting–even through the tough stuff– flows. It’s as if there’s some underground soul aqueduct that carries you through the day, through creativity, love, even struggle and pain.

But sometimes, that aqueduct seems to run dry. Bone dry. And the best you can do is muddle through the unknown, the doubt, the fear, the unexpected bouts of hopelessness. There is no big definitive life-changing action that can be taken. No transformational endpoint in sight. No big future aha moment. Merely trying to hold on takes every ounce of energy.

So, you wait. Wait for change. Wait for signs from the universe. God to send a check. Opportunity to call. Life to get on track. Mercury to return from retrograde. Something. Anything, that says, The doctor will see you now.

In the interim, you stick with what has gotten you through.

It’s different for everyone. I used to rely on two meals a day of frozen yogurt and pretzels. Isolation. Therapy. And anything to numb the pain. Not a terribly healthy or particularly feel-good approach but the best I had at the time.

My current strategy has less immediate gratification but a boatload less fall-out at the end of the day. Exercise. Dark leafy greens. Hot baths. Ginger tea. Sleep. David Sedaris. Observational writing. Metaphor. Sarcasm. Big-headed hydrangea. And white knuckling it through on those dark nights of the soul that cannot be put into words.

There is only one big undeniable truth.

Time cannot be rushed.

The past seven months have made this crystal clear. In June of 2019, Joe was offered the opportunity to become CMO of a California based cannabis company. Generous salary. Full relocation. Crazy stock options. And the chance to pioneer the last great branding frontier. It was a year-long commitment and then we could move back home and open an east coast office.

Joe and I are drawn to life’s what ifs like moths to light.

So, we said yes. We’d move our family to California and right away we began the frantically active process of… waiting. Bizarre, right– the idea of frantically waiting. Rather like an oxymoron. But that was our reality. And as the organizer mom person, I needed to figure out all the details.

Which town, which house, furnished or not. How do we get the dogs there? Do we need to drug them? Which town has the best schools? Public or private? How do I register them? How do I begin networking for boys’ lacrosse? For possible friends? For what I can do to make the transition smoother? For how to persuade/ bribe/ guilt Leo into believing that living with us was better than staying with a friend for a year? For how to explain to Finn that, no, Rodeo Drive was not close by, but the Stanford Mall did have a Tesla store.

Waiting to Take Off

I counted down the weeks, till our plane lifted off and we were finally in route to our new location, our new adventure­– till I was finally on my way to realizing my dream of producing the tv episode series I had created. Joe had been promised a budget that would support it. I had composed a strategic pitch deck for him to present up the line when we arrived. I’d called the director and co-host I wanted involved.

All that was left was to get there, get our feet on the ground and get going. I felt, like I imagine the David Letterman guests used to feel, waiting in the Green Room before going on the show– somewhere between excited and throwing up, a sort of high-anxiety but slightly-pukey glee.

I had been in a creative slum of sorts for a long while. Inner abundance amidst a burned-out tenement of executional possibility. I had ideas. I had lyrics. I had tv show treatments, essays– a wealth of material but no avenues out. Big potential. Zero momentum. I had been waiting to take off for a long time. This was my ticket.

Waiting to Land

We arrived. Got our big ass suburban. Got our dogs from the bizarre pick-up center and got to our new temporary new home in Palo Alto California.  Elegantly modest. Astronomically priced. Impeccably located. Thanks to Joe and Leo’s whirlwind shopping/ unpacking efforts the week before, we had couches, beds and a ginormous tray of Ikea cinnamon buns. The movers had already come so we had our clothes and enough art and knickknacks to make it feel like home.

My friend Samantha stopped by hours after our arrival with armfuls of groceries; everything from paper towels and soap to kale salad, potato chips and fresh-baked chocolate chip cookies. We felt loved and welcomed and it was comforting to see a familiar face.

While she was there, we had our first visit from a neighbor. An older woman, Virginia, came by, not with anything like cupcakes or a loaf of banana bread or nice plant from Trader Joe’s. Just her. She peered into the house. We invited her in to be polite.

She spelled her last name several times and requested the spelling of our first and last names. She then informed that she’d borrowed our composting garbage and noticed, upon looking inside the other bins, that we were not separating our recyclables properly.

Joe and I stood speechless. She looked inside our garbage cans? Dear Lord, is this what we had gotten ourselves into? She proceeded to instruct us, in great detail, how recycling works in Palo Alto. I could feel Joe and I telepathically plotting the imminent intermingling of plastic with the forbidden paper product family.

She spelled her name one last time and left, assuring us she’d return the bin when she was done. It was an uneven day, but I assumed once we unpacked, we’d feel settled.

But even after several weeks went by, I still had this bizarre feeling of hovering.

Our neighbors across the street were positively amazing. The tuna tacos were absolutely delicious. The sunshine was nice, if not a bit oppressively optimistic. Being a New England born child, there is nothing more gratifying than a good thunderstorm every now and then to make cozying up with a book the appropriate thing to do. All in all, it was perfectly fine.

I kept trying to settle in. We walked the Baylands, hiked The Dish, went surfing in Santa Cruz, ate local, created a Farmers Market Sunday ritual. But I couldn’t seem to get grounded. We had landed but I hadn’t. I mentioned this to friends from home and my wonderful new neighbor across the street. They reminded me we had a lot going on. We were still finishing a super complex and stressful construction project on our pool at home, trying to exit a contract with one renter, find another, assimilate into this new place, yadayadayada. All true. But still. Oddly unnerving.

Waiting to Leave

Time went by. School, work, grocery shopping, dog-walking, house-cleaning, laundry. It had an uneasy flatness about it. And then it began falling apart– slowly at first; then all at once like a freight train of catastrophe. Both of our cars got totaled. Leo got locked in a bathroom and forced to vape. Joe’s boss began yelling and threatened to choke peoples’ throats and put their cocks on blocks.

The environment went from toxic and demoralizing to abusive and traumatic. We decided to leave. And then without ever having landed we plotted our exit strategy.

Waiting to Get Home

The days ahead were a minefield of consequences.

The ‘to do list’ morphed overnight into a high anxiety countdown of ‘or else’. We need to get out of our obscenely expensive lease or else we will have to sell our house or rob a bank.

We need to get back into our fully furnished home in CT (that our renters are only using as an occasional get-away from their place on Park Avenue) or else we will have to find a 7-month rental that takes dogs and isn’t horribly depressing. And… it will need to be furnished or else we will have to move all our furniture back and find yet another place to stay in between.

Kids need to be registered in two weeks or else they won’t be able to start the second semester on time. Both dogs need vet approval and tickets or else we won’t make our flights. Joe needs to get an exit package or else we will need to hire an attorney.

We have to sell the one partially totaled car because it’s not worth transporting home or else we will need to wrap it up from across the country. We will have to buy new cars or else we will have no mode of transportation when we get home. You get the idea.

It was a full-on sh** show.

Our landlord could not have been more gracious. Our renters could not have been less compliant. There were no furnished rentals, but friends let us stay at their house in Laguna while our furniture got moved. My sister and brother-in-law provided an incredibly generous safety net of financial relief and when the movers changed the arrival date by a week, they also let us stay at their home in Greenwich.

The dogs made it. The kids got registered. The house is perfectly fine. The company screwed Joe, but our wonderful Palo Alto neighbor gave us an amazing attorney helped us immeasurably. And it would appear now that it is going to resolved without a lawsuit. Oh, and we found two terrific pre-owned hybrid cars as an homage to our California journey.

Waiting to Understand Why We Went

We arrived at JFK. Cabs honking. Cops gesticulating. Guy blowing cigarette smoke directly in my face. I smiled. None of it was annoying. It looked like heaven and smelled like freedom. New York… New England… Old times. New start. I felt like Odysseus returning to Ithaca after his adventures. I was not the same. Joe and Leo and Finn were not the same. Our family dynamic was not the same.

We were closer and yet more independent. Broken yet more resilient. Shaken yet more confident. We didn’t speak about it, but I could tell we each knew it would not be the same. We would need to figure out who we wanted to be as a result of who we had become, what we had learned, where we had been– both the physical places and emotional spaces.

Leo had a newfound maturity but with it had come a loss of innocence that would not allow him to slip back into his previous friendships the same way. He had relied on the kindness and wisdom of conversations with girls from home to navigate our experience. This was new. Not what he and his friends had done before. It would not be the same. His inner landscape had changed and so had theirs. It would be exciting and confusing. Familiar and foreign.

We were all finding ourselves in this newly minted world.

Even the details of our physical environment had changed. The same green sign on the Merritt Parkway announcing the Westport/ Weston exit had become a talisman– a beloved counterpoint to another life in which El Camino Real marked the way home.

The winding roads and meandering stone walls, the barren winter trees gathering strength back in their roots– all of it now resonated in a different way. It was no longer around us; it was inside us. It grounded us. Landed us.

Sure, the landscape was home but the house– not so much.

It was bizarre to be living in this weird alternate reality version of our previous Westport life. I kept looking around our 70’s condo-style, stink-bug friendly, vertical-vinyl-blinded rental wondering, why are we here.

Are we meant to move to another house in Westport? To use some of this new furniture we were forced to move back with us? Why are we still in limbo?

The other morning, over a big steaming cup of coffee, it came to me.

We are here to create time instead of spending it.

Had we moved directly back into our home, we would have slipped directly back into our old life, our old routines, our old patterns and mindsets. We would not have taken the time to re-evaluate how we wanted to be, who we wanted to be, what we truly wanted to do.

Joe would never have started spin classes because that was not our routine. We never would have gone out after class for coffee because our old mindset said I am perfectly capable of making coffee so why waste the money. We never would have designated Mondays and Fridays as New Venture Project days because that kind of latitude just didn’t exist in our previous version of ourselves.

Had we been unfortunate enough to move seamlessly back into our beautiful home, we would have missed this wide-open playground of possibility.

We would have continued viewing time as a currency to be used rather than a new world to be explored. As a series of transactional tools instead of a field of transformational moments.

All this being absolutely true, I am still waiting.

Even as I write this, I am waiting.

Waiting (2 hours) for Joe and boys to get back from lacrosse. Waiting (days, possibly weeks) until we sell the car we left in California. Waiting until 3 hours goes by so I can eat again. Waiting (6 months) until we can move back into our house. Waiting (two years) to see if Leo gets an early college commit for lacrosse.

Waiting (who knows how long) to see if Joe’s deals go through. Waiting (hopefully not much longer) to get over this sinus infection. Waiting (weeks, months, years– who knows) to see if I can get any of my creative projects off the ground.

We are all waiting for something, right? All the time.

But my waiting has lost its edge. There is no more minefield. No more ‘or else’.

Most noticeably, my waiting is no longer a survival tactic. No longer an exit-less room. I am back in the flow of my life processing this California experience over however many months it takes. A photograph takes time to develop. To reveal the details of what exactly has been captured.