Big Feelings
By Sonya Spillmann
@sonyaspillmann
Underwear. Underwear. Normal underwear. My hands rummage through bras I should throw away, shapewear I don’t use, and lacy panties stuffed to the sides of what my mother used to call a “lingerie” drawer. It’s the same drawer in the same dresser she once kept ten pairs of various shades of pantyhose, beautiful scarves, and every length of silk slip folded into discrete square piles. I am, decidedly, not as refined as she was—nor as neat. My hands search into the back edges for comfortable underwear when I unexpectedly touch a small box.
Once upon a time, my mom sewed iridescent blue beads into the shape of an “S” onto the top of a small heart-shaped box—the kind you might find in an aisle of a craft store. Once finished, she gave it to my cousin as a gift. Decades later, this same cousin turned the age my mom was when she’d died, which is to say very young. Thinking I might want the box as a momento, my cousin offered it to me. Having so little of my mom’s things, I thanked her, brought it home, and placed it where I thought my mother would have said it belonged—in this drawer. And then, I promptly forgot about it.
Now, with the box in my hands, I pull off the lid. When I see what’s inside, I start to laugh: a crisp one hundred dollar bill. Where did the money come from? I can’t tell you. I’m somewhat of a squirrel in this sense, always have been—I tuck away cash like acorns before winter. The problem? (Or maybe the reason I keep doing it) is that I almost always forget about the money. It’s such a delight to find what you’re not looking for.
I rub the folded paper between my fingers and make a decision. Wrapped in a towel, and still in need of underwear, I place the cash back in the box, close the drawer, and walk to the basement where at least one pile of clean laundry awaits.
Later, I schedule a facial—an absolute indulgence—which I will pay for with my acorn money.
***
When I was twenty, when my undergraduate student co-pay for anything from a flu shot to antibiotics was five dollars, the likelihood of being able to afford professional counseling was high. Unfortunately, therapy (to help me process the grief from my mom’s death two years earlier) never crossed my mind. Or maybe I should say: I was already married, I had close friends, was getting good grades, and was on track to graduate from a prestigious university with honors. Obviously, I was fine.
A few years later, my husband had a life-threatening health issue that completely rocked our world. After his recovery, when we couldn’t stop fighting or misunderstanding each other, we sought help from a marriage counselor covered by our insurance. After a handful of sessions, after experiencing what we considered a breakthrough, we quit. “But this is when you really need to keep coming back,” the counselor said. “Now is when we can really work on the issues, on everything underneath.”
“We know,” we replied, so confident, so young. “But we’re good.”
***
The facial becomes the focal point of my month. I anticipate it like a vacation. Wanting to arrive calm and relaxed, I plan my week, my day, my hours so I’m not rushed nor late. I plan what to wear, eat beforehand—even if I’ll stop for coffee or tea later.
***
After the first years of the pandemic and my concurrent breast cancer diagnosis, I arrive at a therapist's office, the walls painted a crisp bright white. In explanation for why I’m there, I offer a general, “This experience brought up a lot.” Though what I want to say is, I need to talk about my mom.
The therapist wastes no time finding the hole in my heart I’d dammed up with as much resolve and faith and stories of others who—according to some grand scale of tragedies—went through worse, and bore their burdens with silence and grace. She offers me a safe space to break wide open, where my heart could flood with twenty years worth of held-back grief.
I am asked about my support system. Who do I trust? Who can I talk to? What do I enjoy? I am told it is important—no, imperative—to be gentle with myself on the days we meet, and often for days afterward. Treat each session as the emotional equivalent to a hard workout. To be tender afterwards is normal.
Yes. I understand. Yes, I say. But my kids are home, and rest isn’t always an option. I have, as I’ve always had, to carry on with life’s demands.
But when the kids go back to school and I find the tucked-away squirrel money, I schedule the facial an hour after my weekly appointment.
***
Over and over, I imagine laying on the warm table, my hair pulled back, steam caressing my face. I feel kind and gentle hands cleansing, circling, massaging my skin. Two thumbs press into that space between my eyebrows then move out to my temples. Fingers caress my hairline then work into the meaty part of my jaw—the hinge of so much tension. Then my neck, my hands, my arms. Finally, those minutes when she wraps me up and covers my eyes and walks out of the room, leaving me to the soundtrack of my own breath.
***
For the rest of my life, I could have stayed—mostly—contained. But unhealed grief is never neat. It seeps out in marriage and motherhood and the view of who I am. I called it frustration. Disappointment. Anger. So much anger. And I got so good at pointing fingers while cleaning up all the mess I’d made.
My fear in going to therapy, especially as time went on, was that I would be told I should be over it by now. That what happened was sad but not debilitating. In contrast, I feared going and falling so deep into my emotions, so far into what I already had gotten through, I’d drown. Better to never dip your toes in at all than to realize you aren’t strong enough to swim.
But week after week, I arrive in the white room with the couch. I unlock closed parts of myself, give shape and names to emotions I’d shut down, shut out, or forgotten about completely—the same way I do with money in underwear drawers. With help, with supervision, I learn to submerge and return to safety. I am not left to fend for myself.
It almost seems pathologic, I say, this ability to compartmentalize, move on. My therapist suggests I start calling it survival.
***
On the day of my facial, I drive home from the white room, the skin around my eyes already soft and tender. I have enough time to eat and use the bathroom before I need to leave.
While standing in the kitchen eating, a fire truck, siren on, roars past my house. We live on a cut-through street, in a neighborhood mixed with the elderly and the young. We’re close to a firehouse, and at the end of the road is our elementary school where two of my four kids attend. An ambulance wails by next. I walk to the front door, place my forehead against the side light and my hand against the wall. Dear Lord, I pray out loud, please let them not be going to school.
I walk back into the kitchen, eat a few more bites, and then my phone rings. The name of the school flashes on the screen.
***
It’s not that I wasn’t allowed to grieve. It’s just that at a certain point, my grief became private. I cried in my room and on my drives to class but I absorbed an affirmation in being contained. Grades. Friends. A steady job. She’s doing so well, and all that.
When individuals live within systems of collective trauma, they are taught behaviors and methods of coping believed to be normal and acceptable. So if, as a group, or in the generation before, there has been a shared traumatic experience, behavior becomes something of a map, a guide, an unspoken rulebook.
My mother died when I was younger. A tragedy, yes. But how much worse is that than the generation before me, in the community I grew up in, where families were torn apart by war, by political power, and because of their faith and heritage?
My mother died, yes. But if they, those before me, left their country and families and livelihoods for a “better life” for which they chose to be grateful now under any circumstances, what right do I have to complain?
Therapy? For what? You have everything we ever dreamed of. Freedom. Opportunity. Your children, beautiful, healthy. Your husband, faithful, provides. You—educated, getting facials.
I see what came before me and honor their experience. But I am ready to make a new way on a new path with new rules.
So I sit on a couch and cry through the past and look those hurt younger versions of myself in the face. For an hour every week, I fight the muscle memory of gritting my teeth and shoving myself into someone else’s tiny little boxes.
***
I answer the phone with an aggression I don’t expect. “Hello—.” It isn’t a question.
“Hi, this is the school nurse—”
“—which kid is it?” I say.
“How are you doing today?” she asks.
Her casualness, though simultaneously frustrating is reassuring, but it doesn’t prevent my hands from shaking. “What happened? Is everyone okay?”
When she says, “Yeah, it’s Viv,”—my youngest—my heart and stomach rearrange. The nurse goes on to tell me that my daughter was shocked while plugging in a computer cart.
“Is she okay?”
As a former burn and trauma nurse, I have seen, held, taken care of individuals after electric injuries. I have tended to holes where the energy blew out of bodies, tended to bodies thrown across space, and tended to empty spaces—between eyes—the body a useless remnant of a still beating heart.
My baseline for okay is very, very low.
“Yes,” she says, though I still need her to qualify her words. “But it’s our protocol to call 9-1-1 after someone gets shocked.” I nod, though she cannot see me. “Mom,” she says with a gentle, almost apologetic voice, “You’re going to need to come in.”
Again, I nod, already grabbing my keys and purse. “Okay, I’ll be right there,” I say as I stick my feet into shoes and walk out the door. I think of nothing but getting to my daughter.
Nothing but my daughter. But also, if there were a transcript of that conversation, the other side of the same piece of paper would have my inner dialogue: But I have a facial in thirty minutes!
***
My minivan swerves past the ambulance and firetruck and I throw my car into park next to their flashing lights. I run to the school door, press the security button. When the door unlocks, I rush into the office towards the clinic. Two paramedics stand next to a stretcher in the hall. Five more paramedics and firemen in blue uniforms surround my daughter’s small frame. Her teacher, the principal, and a vice principal stand next to her. The nurse is at her desk. Viv sits on a plastic purple chair up against the wall. Her finger points into a pulse oximeter plugged into a portable AED, monitored by a grown man. She stares with wide eyes at all the adults around her.
I rush in, and with one look at the AED screen—ICU nurse habits that will never leave me—I see her oxygen is normal, her heart rate regular. She’s fine. I fall to my knees in front of her and envelope her body like an ocean wave. She hugs me back, and with me there—with me there—she starts to cry.
After a minute, I pull back, look at the monitor again and say to the medic, “Can I take this off?” in reference to the device on her finger. He nods.
I hand it to him then put my hands on her face. She tries to smile. I pull her hands out in front of me, to look at her palms. I lift her legs, one at a time, twisting them around. “Did you examine her?” I ask the man by the machine. Yes, he says. “No injuries?” I ask. He shakes his head, no.
I turn the other way, to where the school administrators are. To the teacher, “Did she lose consciousness?” No. “Get thrown back?” No. “Was there a visible spark?” No.
My whole body melts in relief.
I pick Viv up and we sit together on the small purple chair. She rests her head under my chin and I wrap my arms around her. “So, she’s fine,” I say to the room of adults, more of a declaration than a question. I have made my own assessment.
“Do you want us to take her to the hospital?” one of the paramedics asks. I shake my head, no. I explain my medical training, and they all laugh and smile. “Then I’ll just need you to sign this.” He offers an electronic pad and pen, “That you’re refusing any further evaluation.”
With my daughter in my arms, I sign.
Is my evaluation enough? Can I be confident in my own experience?
***
The school nurse who called me says Viv only started to cry when she learned she’d be sent home. The last time she went to the clinic and I was called, she felt miserable, and I made her rest all day—so much more boring than school. “Viv wanted to stay here,” the nurse says.
“Can she?” I ask the room. The paramedics nod yes. The administrators nod.
The teacher says, “Of course! I love having Viv in class!”
I turn back to my daughter. Then, to all the adults, and say “I don't need privacy,” I hug Viv protectively, “But can we have a few minutes without everyone looking at us?”
***
In those three minutes it took to drive to school, I called the spa and left a message. “I’m sorry this is so late but … ” and cancel my facial. I explain there was an emergency and that I will, hopefully, someday, at some point, reschedule.
***
The first responders pack up, the others back away. Viv scoots onto the chair next to me, and we look at each other face to face. I smile and ask her to tell me, in her words, what happened: She’d noticed the computer cart was unplugged, and wanting to be helpful, she tried to plug it in. In the process, she got shocked. As she speaks, her mouth turns down, her lips quiver, and her eyes rim red and wet. She is trying so hard to hold herself together.
“Viv,” I say, protectively, instinctively—permissively. Right here, in this moment, it feels as if two sides of myself have sewn themselves together in the space behind my heart, each stitch solid and tight. I hold her hands, lean in close. I do not care who hears, “These are big feelings.” She tries to smile, as if to please me. As if to tell me she’s okay. But she’s scared and I know it. Her tears drop and pool on the frames of her glasses.
“You don’t need to smile.” She doesn’t need to be brave, to be strong, to be anything but what she’s truly feeling. “You can cry,” I nod, as if in encouragement. And then, in what I didn’t know I needed to hear myself, in what I didn’t know I could speak over and into my own life, my voice cracks, “You can let out all your big feelings.”
Through my own tears that start to fall, I assure both of us: “Your big feelings are okay.”
Your big feelings are okay. Your big feelings are okay.
I hug my daughter tight, and her little arms hold onto my middle. She pulls away, looks up, and I can see her concern over my tears. “It’s okay honey. You don’t have to take care of me. I’m here to take care of you.” In this moment, I am so proud to be able to say—and to mean—these words. I wrap my daughter up again and we stay like this, hugging, until her sobs subside and she starts to squirm.
“You ready?” I ask, thinking she wants to get back to class.
“In a minute,” she says. And we sit there, holding hands, together.
Sonya Spillmann lives in the DC area with her husband and four kids. She is a staff writer for Coffee + Crumbs and also writes on her blog. You can sign up for her newsletter and listen to her and Adrienne on the Exhale podcast every month.
Photo by Jennifer Floyd.