When live gives you lemons, make lemonade. How often I have heard that refrain, but for me -- a glass is half empty girl -- I just can't seem to get those lemons to make anything drinkable. Caustic, I can do, but not drinkable. So ponder this, if you will -- how does one change from caustic lemonade to the sweet/slightly tartness that we long for as we are squeezing the heck out of those lemons?
I surely do not pretend to even be in the same ball park as one who would succeed at the task. My whole life, I have been carrying around those lemons and my half empty glass of sourness. I have seem the effects on those that love and care about me. I see it daily in my own son.
As I long for the ability to change my life -- and perhaps my lifestyle -- I cringe at the same bitterness that I have passed onto my son. At his tender age of manchild, he fights the same demons that have possessed my body time and again. He thinks of death as a welcoming blanket of relief; it being the only beacon of hope that sometimes glimmers in the pit of darkness that overtakes us.
I all too frequently visit that pit. I wonder if I will ever be able to traverse a road without falling into that same pit. I know it is there, and I do my best to avoid it. Sometimes I can take another route altogether, but, most often, I am pulled along until it looms before me as some ugly monster, and in fighting, I fall back into the pit.
I fight and claw my way back to the edge, only to be called back by the piteous cries of a manchild. I try to make myself forge ahead, if only I could get a leg over the edge -- but the cries from below make me stop -- the sound is so familiar. It oozes of desperation, of a helplessness only a child can have. I loosen my grip on the edge, and stop fighting for that leg up and allow my self to free fall backwards into the pit, not being able to full myself free from the cries, nay, the demands for help that I hear beneath.
The bright light of day begins to fade away as the blackness begins again to engulf me. Once reaching the bottom, I can no longer see, so I feel with my hands, being pulled ever closer to the cries that prevented my escape of the darkness that now I wear like a cloak. I reach forward -- I am ever so close -- and finally a hand touches mine. The voice asks for me to come closer, to provide the comfort that will sooth the now tired manchild. I wrap my cloak around him and pat him, just as I did when he was but a baby. It is then that I realize I can choose to either leave the pit on my own, or stay and teach the manchild to make his way to the single ray of light that looms ahead.
He talks ever so softly, and begins to tell me of an even larger pit, one that he has been promised will envelop him forever. He asks if this other pit wouldn't be the best choice for him -- and perhaps even me. I tell him that I am aware of the other pit, and I have sought it out before, only to be yanked away from the edge by caring hands. I tell him of things that are available only if the ray of light is followed. He can't make up his mind -- there are so many thoughts tangled, and he can only be in this moment, not even capable of thinking of the next.
I push aside my own desire to reach the light and wrap myself around him, much as I have done so many times before, and whisper that I will never leave him, even if it means that we survive, because one can never experience a full life in the pit -- it only allows moment to moment events. Thus bound together, we sit in the darkness. I am thankful that he is not alone, but wonder if together we will ever make it to the light and out of the pit. My only hope is that the transformation from manchild to man gives him the strength and the courage to try. But for now, we huddle together, one wishing for the strength to climb out, but tied in the darkness to her own flesh, while the other wishes for the strength to pull away and fall into the pit of nevermore.
