BREAKING THE ROLES

Ha! Bet you thought I meant Rules, didn’t you? Yeah, I’ve been known to be a bit of a rule-breaker. Or at last to have a mild disdain for most rules unless they have proven pragmatic value. But this post is NOT about breaking rules. This post is really about the reason I am here in Yellowstone.

 

In the past two years, my life has changed a lot. My only son graduated from college and decided to live near the other border – the one with Canada – instead of where he grew up in Arizona.  My dear mother was laid to rest after a living with dementia a very long time. I was traveling so much to be with my mother I had to drop of lot of activities and positions I enjoyed. My sweet dog died and it is unlikely I will take on that responsibility in the near future.  And a series of cycling accidents and falls were a very direct reminder that life is fragile and bodies don’t function at their maximum youthful capacity forever.

 

To be sure, as I experienced these changes in my life, I grieved for my mother, my youth, my dog, for my son’s constant presence in my life.  As I grieved for the person or animal – the relationship - I began to more clearly understand that almost all losses come with roles that we also can lose.  I was no longer a mother that my son needed, being a confident young man.  I was no longer a daughter, a leader, or a dog companion. I had to take a break from the role of active adult I like in order to heal.

 

Each one of these roles comes with an entire culture of expectations and agreements about what to do, how to act and who to be.  Every role we play in lives – husband or wife, mother or father, daughter or son, best friend, lover, business partner, boss, employee – they all provide structure to our lives, structure that helps us move rather automatically from one environment and task to another. We are sometimes in these roles for so very long – I was Mother’s daughter for 59 years – our patterns attributable to these roles become ingrained in us. Sometimes it feels like losing even one of those roles could mean a rent in the tapestry of our lives so permanent that has the potential to unravel the whole.

 

So what happens when our roles are obsolete? What happens when wife no longer has a husband or husband no longer has a wife? What happens when daughter or son no longer has a mother? What happens when you are laid off and are no longer waking up each work day to earn your living? The losses themselves are nearly unfathomable but what about the loss of the role? Do we even recognize the impact that losing the expectations and behaviors that are inherent to those roles?

 

One day I was reading aloud to Mother and the next day those long flights were no longer necessary. My mornings seem longer and somehow less beautiful without the need to take that cranky old canine for her morning walk in her favorite wash. When child or partner leaves, you no longer have to cook for two – or even cook something that you just marginally like for someone else. When you no longer have employment, you get up at 6am to get ready for work and remember that you no longer have to. Once your lose your lover, Valentine’s Day comes around just to remind you that you no longer have a ‘valentine’.

 

The loss of the role may have the potential to be even more life-altering than the loss of relationship. The losses I incurred over the past two years have lead to so many changes in the roles I have had to play and certainly enjoyed these many years. So how does one cope with the loss of the roles? The benefits, the structure, the expectations they provide us? How do we know who we are without the relationships helping to define us?

 

Obviously, one option to keep the role and replace the relationship. A husband can take another partner and often does. A lover often finds a ‘rebound romance’ in order to hang on to the role. A daughter might bond with an older, wiser woman friend or focus her loss on her own children, smothering them with the mother love she misses and expecting them to reenact her role as daughter. A dog-lover might visit the local animal shelter and come away with a dog.

 

That might work for some. But it doesn’t work for me. Naturally cautious about relationships, I am not one that easily replaces relationships, even with animals. The longer I wait for the ‘right fit’, the more I realize that my role was unique to the person or animal with whom I played it. I am shedding the cultures of both those relationships and those specific roles. Discovering what I am like without my old roles helping define my days and responses to my days is an entirely different task.

 

Change usually produces chaos and chaos is where I grow the best. It is an act of courage and of chaos to leave your home and belongings with just enough to fit into your truck and drive north to a place that will promises no comforts of home, no familiarity of surroundings. What Yellowstone represents is a certain rawness of existence that is almost monastic. Or at least for me.

 

I am on Retreat. Not retreat from life, but a break during which I am examining whether the structures and cultures of my old roles have meaning anymore to my life. I am a seasonal worker and the only expectation is that I will get along with my coworkers, do my job well and complete my contract. I don’t feel a lot of pressure to begin constructing a new Role. I am open and available to discover exactly what I need in the present.

 

Who am I when stripped away from all that I know? All that I have been for many, many years? Yellowstone seems like the perfect setting for my quest. I’m only a quarter of the way through my odyssey, my journey, and I have only begun to understand the reasons I typed “jobs in Yellowstone” into my search engine so many months ago. I have only begun to be grateful for the rip in the fabric of my oh-so-comfortable life. Sometimes you have to start over from the beginning. Sometimes you have choose a new beginning.

 

Five months is just barely time enough to begin examining the murky depths of my mental landscape. I have been a daughter, a mother, a leader and a dog person for a long time. What is it like to be none of these things? To do none of these things? To have none of these roles defining my existence? Yellowstone is not the answer; it is only the beginning of the quest to discover the answer. The question? If I were to choose to be exactly who I wanted to be and to live exactly where I wanted to live and to do exactly what I wanted to do, what in the world would that be?