Cocooned and Quieted
The closer we get to the move, the more my brain threatens to check out. I’m still here—teaching the kids, proofing papers for my husband, meeting up with friends, making phone calls, washing dishes and clothes and smoothie encrusted faces—but half the time it feels like an out of body experience where the part of me that’s out of body isn’t really paying that much attention and would prefer to just go out for ice cream.
This is our seventh move in twelve years. I’m allowed to say things like this.
One of the things that is great about this being our seventh move is that I know how this goes. I don’t mean “this” in the sense of the actual nuts and bolts of the move. I mean “this” in the sense of my own mental and emotional state throughout the transition time.
Our fourth move, I told myself that this time it wouldn’t be so hard. I knew the ropes, the aforementioned nuts and bolts. We’d been there, done that, and I was confident in my military wife skills. And I was wrong. It was still exhausting. Just that time (and all the times since), I could see the exhaustion coming like a freight train when you’re tied to the tracks. Unless you’re Bill Grogan’s goat with a stomach full of red long-Johns to barf up, there’s no flagging down that train. It will run you over. You will conceded defeat. Acknowledging that on the front end helps me budget time for naps and not feel like I’m losing quite so much of my sanity, but it doesn’t keep it from happening.
With all that said, this year we have a hammock.
Tuesday, I hung it between two tall, gorgeous, green-frilled trees in our backyard. Since then, Bee has managed to fall out of it, adding to the war-wounds that completely cover both of her long, brown legs. Bruiser has tried to spend all of his time in it while still attempting constant, full-throated conversation with whoever is on the porch, twenty yards away. And Twinkle has developed a heart stopping technique in order to sling herself into it that makes you almost 100% certain that she’s going to kill herself in the attempt.
I, personally, have snatched two fifteen minute slivers of peace in it both days since then. And there is something about being cocooned, rocked, cradled that has calmed me in an unexpected way. Yesterday, after spending the entire morning and afternoon in a dense fog, those fifteen minutes woke me up enough that I was fully present for dinner on the porch and bed time tuck in.
May I say: that was a small, truly unexpected blessing.
I’ll also tell you this: we have five weeks left in this house, a little over six left before the actual move, and a lot of people would say that hanging a hammock for that length of time is an unnecessary bother. They are wrong.
If you are in a season of unsettling—whether that’s physically, by moving or adding a kid or uprooting into a different kind of community, or emotionally, mentally, or spiritually—this is me giving you permission—from someone who has been there, done that (with aplomb) and understands in a tangible way that knowing how to do something doesn’t always make it easier—this is me giving you permission to take that nap, read that book, hang that blessed hammock.
That doesn’t mean you are quitting. You will get back up and try again, and taking that small bit of a rest may increase your bandwidth more than you anticipated.
Change is challenging. It can also be really wonderful—next time, I’ll be hanging our hammock from a pair of saguaro cacti. But it’s good to recognize our innate need to be held gently, rocked tenderly, cocooned safely—in a nap, by ones we love, with a book, by a hammock—when the world around us feels so uncomfortably new and blinding-bright and overwhelming. The desire to be comforted in that moment is the same when we are adults as it was when we were newborns. We just pretend to hide it better.
As I sit here, writing about my hammock, thinking about what it means to be wrapped in safety and stillness, this verse comes to mind:
He will quiet you with his love. Zephaniah 3:17
God knows we need this quieting, this tenderness, this being held. It’s no surprise to Him. He offers it to us, and He does so in a lot of different ways.
And this week, He happened to use a hammock.
