Shedding Skins

Would it be rude to sit with pen and paper and write during church?  Yes, probably so, especially elbow-to-elbow with a stranger on Easter.  I’ll just have to attempt and recreate that thought that has been floating for months and gained form this morning.  It’s late afternoon.  I’ve exchanged contacts for glasses, stylish sandals for busted Birkenstocks, and my new skirt is partly unzipped to accommodate the generous, mimosa complimented meal earlier.

This morning the preacher mentioned the Easter tradition of new clothes or just wearing your very best, since with shedding of Christ’s blood we are all made new and clean.  Finery on Easter Sunday is symbolic of the old, dirty self passing away to be replaced by raiments of God’s grace and glory. 

The sin skin shed.  

Over the last few years of life, I feel like I’ve constantly been shedding skins.  At the moment of the shed, the old me is emptied, and the new emerges a bit fragile and dazed, leaving the brittle remnants of former self.  It can be like a damp new insect emerging from a chrysalis at just the right moment as one phase of life makes room for the next.  It can be sudden and violent like the phoenix bursting into flames, leaving the old as a pile of ashes and beginning again from square one.  It can be snake-like and practically unnoticeable until I come across the transparent form that was previously.  

Gentle and expected or violent and shocking, change is hard for me.  I feel empty at standing in the change.  Whether it’s the change of family dynamic as we add a new member, an uprooting move, or a simple change of plans, I struggle to adjust internally though the waters may seem calm outwardly.  At times I feel like Eliot’s J. Alfred Prufrock, “I have measured out my life with coffee spoons.”  Though my tone is far more optimistic and I don’t drink that much coffee anymore, my days are meted out in 2-3 hour segments with two small children in the house.  

Down the rabbit hole and away from the spiritual meaning, but it was the springboard that prompted this slowly-congealing realization.  The years of change have been the most challenging and stressful, but I’ve been picking up pieces of the old me along the way—writing for fun, remembering that I’m married to my best friend and the most wonderful man ever, going out with friends, being more fun and relaxed, cooking and entertaining a bit, enjoying clothes again after 4 years of gaining and losing and two generous visits from the boob fairy.  

A year ago, I’d probably tell you that I was miserable and sleep deprived with an 18 month old and a 3 year old, but it is sitting better now.  We’ve all grown, but I’ve mostly picked out my drummers beat amongst the chaotic harmony of the house.  The past lows made me more, they added.  In the moment, I felt like they were draining me of me, of individual identity.  They weren’t.  Even the times that I felt empty, I was just the opposite--new space had been made without stripping me at all.  I’ve backtracked and picked up the best and most longed for parts of me from those sheddings. 

Like an Impressionist painter’s images of reapers in the golden light of late day swinging scythes to harvest the dry yet fruitful stalks of grain, I’m looking back and idealizing the process—it was exhausting, dirty, underpaid labor, yet the perspective makes all the difference.  Instead of resisting change so, maybe I should try letting go of the conventions of polite society a bit more, let my gaze become less direct and judgmental, and notice how the shapes and forms are first made of light and colors.  In that light, the many mes I struggled to hang on to or reclaim are transparent shadows compared to the present.  I am far from perfect but now more open to the opportunity that change can create.  In that light, I too am formed of colors richly reflected and always changing, gloriously new and old as the mythologies of dying and rising deities all at once.