How was last year for you?
I hope it was good and even better than good.
Yesterday, I arrived back via train from Barcelona to our medieval village. I stared out the window for thirty-nine minutes as the AVE flew through the Catalan countryside like a heavy feather. My thoughts were on repeat. Why am I so drawn to reflect backward to last year in these early weeks of 2024? What am I looking for and why do I look away?
It's morning as I sit perched in the windows of Hidden Cafe looking onto the Onyar River that runs through the charming old town.
Girona, Spain (population 100,000)--where its futbol team historically sits atop La Liga, one of the cycling capitals of the world (Lance Armstrong lived here for years), a jewel of gastronomy, food, farming and wine, and where epic scenes from Game of Thrones was filmed.
I often tell people who care about fútbol/soccer—Imagine….Girona’s population is the capacity of FC Barcelona’s stadium.
It's a warm winter day. I can see the famous Eiffel bridge stretched over the river. How can a masterpiece of woven red metal make humans feel such wonder?
Yesterday's train musings are still with me. Why does last year seem to be so present as I walk and write forward? Part of me feels strong going into 2024 and part like I'm limping with blinders on…avoiding unfinished business.
L a s t year...I am awestruck at how the very good audaciously dances in the same river as the very very hard.
I sit here at this warm cafe feeling a persistent pull to go back there. I close my eyes briefly and hesitantly reflect on fourteenish months ago to the dawn of last January's first week. My heart and body glitch. Should I forget this futility and wander over to Zara? I deserve to be distracted, don’t I?
I get up and get another tiny coffee.
2023 was a year cocktailed with extreme happenings. It had me left-hooked and whiplashed. I had no idea how life would be so flipped and tossed and taken.
Things were restored too. But it doesn't feel like enough. Not yet anyway.
Last year plated up the most connected year with my adult kids, especially my daughters. Mama-daughter dynamics can make the most stable of moms crosseyed with bewilderment. We had to dig oh-so deep. We chose to grow up…together. Amazingly, the parent-child dynamic mostly matured and gloriously slipped into the background and we are friends—usually, we are the best of friends.
It's easy to write about the good times of our life in Spain and our penchant for risk and rare roads. I also know that there are core human experiences we all share, whatever our path, personalities or location on the globe. I am reminded that my life has been changed and healed by the vulnerable sharing of others. It is mostly the case that the exposing of our fragilities helps us and others more than our highlight reels.
I stare at the river, the water is low. I twirl my thoughts into wooly yarn balls as I try to sort what is benign, helpful or even inspiring to share on a public blog. I’m allergic to wool so the thoughts are scratchy and red and I can feel the resistance closing in. I'm not keen on oversharing but also not amused by under sharing and skimming lightly over elephants in rooms.
To flutter tastelessly past 2023 like watery, froth-less veggie milk would be deeply unvulnerable. This goes against my most basic values.
Life holds certain chapters that are a wild-minded mixture of triumphs and valleys. This is the essence of story. Have I yet learned the futility of resenting struggle and shadowboxing valleys? I do it anyway. But I must confess—it does seem to make the valleys longer and more of a dirge.
I finish my cafe con leche and decide to stay with my story as it is…not as I wish it to be.
As the early days of 2023 floated by, I couldn't see around the bend. My usual 'future-casting' was bogged. It can feel disorienting when you can't get a more long-term gaze. We don't like not knowing basic plans for our future. The surrender required when new roots are barely holding and life is shifting is a special flavor of hard.
This was January 2023. We had been steeped in the hot tea of launching five kids from ages 17 to 27. It was and is challenging (I like a good challenge tho) and a privilege and offers endless lessons in surrender. But I was very tired…I remember this.
I can get to feelin’ guilty for being tired or stuck…like I need to move faster and better always, like rest is weakness. It’s one of those early things that is tricky to rewire.
The weather began to warm a bit in Barcelona towards late February and the stuckness began to thaw. Longer days and longer sun can uptick everything.
Winter chapters can thin our skin as the overcast mood can present the smallest of habits and happenings as overly uphill. Winters, the cold—like cold showers and plunges, can also make us thicker-skinned and healthy. Often though, we don't feel it while it's happening.
We need to thaw first.
It was towards the end of that same February when our youngest son rose like a bit of a shooting star in the sport we love. Within twelve days, our barely seventeen-year-old, skipped 2 divisions and was placed in the Spanish third tier by his club. They invited us and his agents to the stadium and offered him his first professional contract. Imagine—one week he was playing his age and the next they were pushing to debut him vs FC Barcelona's second team. This is the stuff of pure delight.
As a family value, we celebrate triumphs. For some of us, pragmatic foreboding can tempt us to minimize joy so we can falsely brace ourselves for potential disappointments. We know life doesn’t work this way. To take the path of discomfort and adventure, to live the story that is yours, you cannot regard static emotions and control of outcomes as top priorities.
This path though, the professional sports road or any divergent jaunt...the whole family goes on the ride and the winning moments are properly celebrated but necessarily short-lived. The hand must be quickly affixed back to the "plow". Less traveled roads are a beautiful madness of sorts. If you are traveling one….you know.
We also built a family business in 2023 that almost collapsed my adrenals. It sounds dramatic but it's only slightly exaggerated. We survived and are ever learning that we have permission to fail, learn and thrive—values that bind our family tight like wolves. Family businesses are not for the faint-hearted. There is the friction of ego-threatening closeness—a worthy flip-side. We are like a depiction of loud and nosey Italians…only we are American, Mexican, Irish, Welch, Spanish and a little of this and that.
Second-born kiddo and his lovely girl both graduated in May and that was a hard-fought feat for both of them…especially Syd, who graduated nursing school. Gideon finished his Div 1 soccer career with an incredible group of friends who became brothers. We flew to Gonzaga University for the celebration and the c r a z y ‘move-out’ from their campus habitations. The house Gideon lived in last was something out of a horror film! They will miss Spokane (wink).
The early Spring turned to late and after six months of back and forths...my just younger sister and I agreed to be interviewed for a docuseries about our family history. Our parents would be central to the story so we felt compelled to say yes. For my siblings and I, there is our lives now and then there is our tragic history. And of course, there is life that happens in the middle where the ‘back then’ meets and mixes.
The 'back then' is something we all have.
I’m not sure you could sort through a dumpster fire for long enough to find the proper balance of brave actions vs the seemingly endless unearthing of piles of shit and courage and narcissism that is our particular history. It will never not be surreal.
Trauma survivors can be prone to hold their collective breath and squeeze their eyes so tight in hopefulness of normalcy. Oh God please—can I savor the goodness without the spirit of “wrecking ball” showing up (uninvited) to mercilessly yank the rug beneath my swoll feet? To heal, survivors must prioritize the safety and regulation of their fritzed-out nerves. We do this while trying to help others who need us (healthy and anchored) so they can recalibrate from being around us. It is not a simplistic tango. Even an oddly timed phone call or message can set the nerves soaring into orbital chaos.
We do our work, we take our supplements and learn to breathe and all the things and this matters. Still, sometimes our beloved humans, the casualties of war and ‘back then’, can’t heal fast enough and the pain puddles and there’s a toppling of life backward. And normally, it’s ok, because usually we rise again—like the phoenixes we are.
Spring was in bloom and our dear, long-time friends, Craig and Jeanne, had come for a first-time visit from California. They went nowhere in Europe and just wanted to live our daily routine with us in Barcelona. They are the type of friends that are so present, so easy on the nerves. We always miss them.
I left a day before they did and was flown by ABC studios from Barcelona to Texas for the filming. Sister and I arrived at a picturesque location in the country outside of Dallas. We were met with Brene Brown's make-up artist and some of Oprah's former film crew. The producers greeted us like long-time friends.
It was nearly 12 hours from start to finish. The crew was amazing but the relief we felt after the last take was immense. The crew was exhausted too but thought we were fantastic. Recounting the stories of our shared upbringing is always raw and traumatic but tends to make us even thicker thieves.
Lisa, I, and our big brother had steak and wine for dinner and hunkered together until the wee hours like younger years. We swore a bit and laughed until we wheezed and laid bare our darkest humor and deepest hearts. Swearing has always been a part of our humor and healing, especially for sister and me. Her renowned therapist maintained that our penchant for swearing was medicinal. He had worked with thousands of trauma survivors and had heard the worst of stories. He stated that all of us are living, breathing wonders, remarkable in fact, and our swearing and humor broke up the sludge and was way better than hard drugs. Ha. There is nothing so cleansing, so communal as processing life’s happenings without qualifying any single word.
The interviews of the day had boomeranged memories right back to the doorstep of our orphaned hearts. I could see the little girl and boy in my sibling’s eyes as they recounted their dastardly stories.
No matter how successful or educated, have you noted that we always carry the younger us with the grown-up us? The younger us just hides better when unprovoked by life’s happenings. Mercifully, as we stay the narrow road (the work we do to live loved), they often integrate. At least, this is the idea.
We left that sweet night having no idea how the 'back then' would rush forward and thread a crushing blow just a few days later…..
(Part Two coming within a day or so)
What a wonderful family you have and what a crazy place your current sanity and wisdom sprang from. This reflective essay you share here feels to me like the first "Dune" movie - the setup for the battle to come in the 2nd installment.
We know the story, but part of us still wishes it would somehow disappear. Thinking about the 2nd part of your story that you are going to share with us, I still shake my head and ask questions that don't have answers. And I think of Adler's quote: “When you loved someone and had to let them go, there will always be that small part of yourself that whispers, "What was it that you wanted and why didn't you fight for it?”
"we always carry the younger us with the grown-up us"... yes! I was just remarking the other day that it helps me be more compassionate when I consider we're mostly little children-selves walking around in adult skin suits. Thank you for sharing. You and your family have been on my heart lately. Love you all.