This morning was terrible.

My daughter started pre-K this week.  Prior to that she’d spent three years at a daycare where she was showered with love and felt incredibly safe and comfortable.  My wife and I were nervous about this transition, and then extremely relieved when the first two days happened with seemingly positive reviews (from what little we could get out of her) and surprisingly little fanfare.  

Then this morning happened.  And it was awful. 

Walking to school was no problem.  We even passed a house and she said, “I think we should move here so we’d be even closer to my new school.”  Then when we got to the block where the school was, I could feel her energy shift.  She made us stop before the entrance and clung to my wife.  From that point on, it was agony.  Our attempts to separate and get her inside were met with tears, then wails.  My wife and I tried to tag team, but nothing was working.  Eventually, I had to pull her off of me, hand her to her teacher, and then just turn around and walk away while she screamed out for me.  

It’s hard to describe how awful that felt (and feels).  It felt like I was betraying some primal impulse to hold on to my child.  Instead, abandoning her.  Like I was showing her that she cannot count on me – that there will be times that she is anxious and afraid and I will pry her off me and walk away.

My heart felt destroyed.

Yes, I know all the things in my head.  I know that she’s safe.  I know that some alternative – e.g., not making her go to school and allowing her to stay attached – will make it worse for everyone.  I know that children must go through these kinds of transitions to build resilience.  I know, even with a hard transition, we’re lucky to have a safe and welcoming school for her.  And that experiencing a (VERY) bad drop-off pales in comparison to life and death struggles that some people experience on a regular basis.

But my heart aches.  And from that perspective, it doesn’t much matter what I know in my head.  My heart is having its own experience. 

And for me, that’s actually a lot of growth.  Allowing my heart and my head to each have their own experience.  Because for most of my life, I didn’t think I could cope with feeling fear or heartbreak.  I avoided pain at all costs.  And I used my head as the primary mechanism to do that (find the silver lining, positively frame what was happening to me, compare it to something worse, or just escape to some other form of mental stimulation).  

In other words:  suppressing my pain.  I’ve paid the price for that in so many ways.  Unaddressed emotions that took root in the body, literally making me sick and feeble.  Missing so many opportunities to face fears, deepen relationships, and to grow as a person because I was determined to avoid my pain.

I’ve worked hard to repair the relationship with my own heart.  To let it breathe and to let it feel.  Even and especially when it’s aching.  And it’s been rough.  Pain, after all, is painful.  But not running away from it has ultimately brought me so much more peace and health.  (Side-note, I still run away from it plenty - it’s all a work in progress.)

I know this is not a “me” thing. I have the privilege of supporting people through their own process of confronting some hard things and working through that.  I think there’s a universal human journey here - part of what connects us.  We all have to grapple with what to do about our pain.  Whether to speed up and turn away or slow down to face the hardest parts of our experience.

A few years ago I saw this journey depicted really poignantly in a powerful miniseries called Dopesick about the opioid crisis.  There’s a scene in which executives at Purdue Pharma are discussing expanding Oxycontin into foreign markets and one of the executives is explaining a “cultural obstacle” that they are encountering in Germany.  “The Germans don’t believe in opioids.  They believe suffering is part of healing.”

This is a theme that comes full circle when the main character of the series, a compassionate small town doctor played by Michael Keaton, becomes addicted to Oxycontin but ultimately recovers and opens up his own addiction clinic.  The series ends with him sitting in a circle with a group of people on the same journey.  What he shared with them struck a deep chord when I first saw the series.

“There’s some kind of pain in all of us that we just don’t want to feel anymore. The further we fall into addiction, the pain says to us, “Hell, it’d be better off just feeling nothing at all,” until we go numb and our souls go numb. Now we got a real problem. You know, pain is just pain. Not good, not bad. Just part of being human being and sometimes good can come out of it, if we’re brave enough and willing to go a little deeper to work our way through it.“

This morning sucked and next morning could be as bad or worse.  This “transition” is probably just starting - not ending.  So my journey now is to go a little deeper and work through it.  Confront my own stuff that this is bringing up for me (it’s not just about my daughter, that much I know already).   And to give my wife and daughter the same space to have / work through their own struggle.  This is a chance for me to grow, but also something we will go through together as a family.

And I’ll end here to stop myself from putting too much of a bow on it :)