This is an update from the original post Use The Force written in 2019.

Why reprise this now, you ask? Because going through events, whether they are playing out on the world stage, or your personal stage, or both as they are often simultaneous, require a kind of patience that takes practice. We re-learn how to engage with our intuition repeatedly, especially when it seems like it’s left the building.

Life plays out in chapters. Which is great when we like the chapter we’re in, and not at all happy happy joy joy when we are suffering.

You’ll hear me say this over and over and over again: when you’re afraid, you can’t hear your intuition. Nothing fear tells you is actually helpful. Your intuition is calm, distinct, and its timing is impeccable. I learned how mine never let me go during the darkest of times, and it served me well in the immediate aftermath. It grew stronger and stayed that way.

I want that for you!

There’s this thing I started with my kids, and have extrapolated to everyone: I love giving cards for birthdays and holidays with the silliest kinds of puns in them like, “It’s your birthday, go nuts!” and then I inscribe them with an explanation of the pun. “Get it? It’s got a drawing of a peanut on it because a peanut is a nut, but ‘going nuts’ is also a phrase we use to describe cutting loose and having a ton of fun! Happy Birthday, loveyoumoreiwin, Mom”.

They used to look at me like I’d lost it. Now, if anyone groaningly admonishes me not to be a Joke Killer, I know I actually killed. Now they laugh with me (or at me, whatever) at the celebration of how lame my adultness has become.

I became a solo single parent when The Junior Gormans were 10 and 12. You may know my kids, who I describe as being on the comedian/heckler spectrum, from the pieces I wrote about them after their father passed away and we were beginning our new lives together. As we moved through our grief, which like a smog surrounded us and made it hard to breathe deeply, I was compelled to tell the stories of our healing. By documenting the good that arrived despite the harshest of losses, our strength was rewarded with more strength. It felt like fresh air, at last.

Shortly after that, I was diagnosed with breast cancer. I survived, and moved through that harrowing time to become the happiest and healthiest I’ve ever been. (I wrote about that a bunch too), in my Boob Lounge series. And, yes. It was horrifying and hard and forced me to call several meetings with God, The Universe, and Everything, as I struggled with the intensity of what was happening.

There were a few months in the beginning before I had surgery when I thought I might die. It took me a while to re-engage my intuition, which told me I wasn’t going to die from cancer. But coming so soon after my husband’s death, I had to reach deep until I knew for sure. It was a terrifying time, but it was also a sacred time. And it also confirmed some things I had suspected about myself and my contract here this time around.

Namely, that I came here to live my life on life’s terms, but in doing so I would discover its biggest gift: the privilege of experiencing the entire depth and breadth of love completely. Apparently, I had wanted to learn how to love really well, and experience being loved the same way, and in order to do that one is often aided in that pursuit by getting their heart broken. Repeatedly.

I get all this now, of course. As clear as my understanding became, there were also many moments during my second initiation into the Life Is Short Club (especially when I was utterly panicked that maybe I was orphaning my kids) when I was not graceful nor wise. I did not enjoy it or understand what the actual fuck the Universe was playing at.

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I want to, but I can’t quite say our new chapter is The Happiest ever, obviously. It feels that way, but I won’t know for sure until the end of my life. I can say with conviction (and annoyingly, I do this regularly), that the last several years were at once the hardest and also the most productive in terms of what I learned. I purged so many blocks to joy from my thinking and consequently from my choices it was like 4:30 pm on the second day of a mental garage sale.

However, since The Junior Gormans are young adults now, my kids are gigantic and hilarious and brilliant and incredibly kind. We are past when they were teenagers and regularly threw curve balls at me. Like, weekly it seemed. I had to develop new parenting tools, and fast. I couldn’t just rely on humor or charm anymore…..or logic. Reasoning, either. Or executive functioning.

God, I miss that one.

I couldn’t wimp out. I had to find my voice with them and use it. Those smart asses were moving through developmental phases so quickly that often I didn’t even understand what was happening, only that suddenly everyone was mad at each other. Each time they jumped into their next stage I felt like I was closer to becoming that crazy lady in a down coat in July, railing at people driving through the crosswalk I was about to enter but can’t because no one notices me. I felt inconsequential, invisible.

Every time they move on, it also means they’re getting cooler and I’m just here, forevermore the mom who will always have sucked at whatever phase they just dusted.

I keep telling them I used to be SO good at this parenting gig. I kept them alive in their first months. Even when I brought them home from the hospital and there wasn’t even a call button connected to the nurse’s station, anywhere in my house.

And I have all sorts of stories about how connected we were when they were little, how they could pick thoughts out of my head and say them, how I knew the things about them all the time that needed to be known so I could be their champion. And I was.

Now they need privacy and space to become their best selves and I am outside their center of gravity. They do not need to hold my hand for steadying.

I’m orbiting around them, most of the time aware they are safe. And that is how my intuition is functioning in this new chapter with them. I know to stay here and stop trying to get in. Even if I have to use the Force to keep still.

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Remember how the hyperdrive on the Millennium Falcon was so unreliable? Han Solo and whoever was with him would prepare for light speed in a crisis and nothing would to work. Each time, after a lot of banging, shouting and button pushing, the audience would be in a complete panic (or at least, I was), and at the very last second…WHOOSH! Miraculously the ship would be catapulted into light speed! Three times this happens in The Empire Strikes Back, and the running gag picks up again in The Force Awakens until Rey fixes it once and for all.

The point I’m trying to make here should be fairly obvious: I am a Star Wars nerd. But also, it is a completely perfect metaphor for what parenting felt like then. And sometimes if I’m honest, right now. Truly, I have never felt more like a Solo single parent.

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Get it? “Solo” single parent! It’s a little about when I was doing this on my own, and also about how I am never fully prepared for light speed. I will never be completely in control of the ship. I just have to trust we’re going to get where we’re going in one piece. And that everyone makes it through, even if the journey goes in fits and starts. Isn’t that cool?

Junior Gormans! Isn’t that cool? Are you listening??