Functional Freeze

Day 747.

It’s therapy day, and we are home. Just us. 

Adam was speaking of moments today, just watching or experiencing an event that he feels Luke would like, thinking Luke would have something to say about this. And it is then, that he feels the loss. And he went on to say that it is as if there are set times he would see him or speak to him in any given day because of work or their daily rhythm. He pointed out that for me it is different. That our contact was continuous, it was without that rhythm. That Luke and I would talk often or all the time, and so I miss him all the time. This is a great observation and resonates deep inside.

Yes, I miss him all the time, because I was in contact with him all the time.

In therapy, we discussed that I had been very social at my party, and although it was authentic, afterward, the feeling that remained was as if I had been pretending, acting, putting on a front. Although this is not how I felt consciously at the time. 

This I am told, is called functional freeze. I imagine a partially defrosted stew where some parts are liquid and others are varying sizes of frozen, solid clumps. 

I am partly functional, I talk and I joke, and I play with and interact well with children. It is real. It is how I feel ( - there’s the liquid part of my stew).

But afterward, the parts of me that are in freeze (those frozen clumps) are exhausted by the ride. For those frozen parts, that behavior is not authentic. 

Is this why I don’t know myself? Is it because not all of me is on the same page? 

My project, my homework, is to find the part of me that was not about being a mum. Well, hmm...

So much of me is linked with my children, so inextricably linked to my life that it’s sometimes hard to separate the chicken from the egg. My plans for the future? Are they for me? For Luke? Who started what?

The rose garden I am planning, Is it for me or for Luke? 

Yes, it will be in the ‘stoge garden’, the place Luke and I were banished with our cigarettes, the place I feel him most often.

Yes, it is therapy for me, it will help me, by bringing the joy of watching things grow. 

Yes, the rose is a thing that Luke and I connect over - because I love them. I love them. 

The wilderness ride with horses that I dream of. The unfulfilled plan of Luke and I. Is that for me, or in homage to him? Unfinished business for Luke and I? Or did he want to do it because I did?

Yes, Luke and I shared a love for horses, but they were my passion before he was born. 

And with an Apache guide!!!! - the stuff of my childhood fantasies - not the equine competition life that horses became with Luke. Horses for real life was my thing - as transport, for delivering and traveling.

Indeed the end of the Netflix show Godless has our hero ride from New Mexico to California to find his family. Imagine riding from New Mexico to Cali! I mused about that for months after seeing it. And now I feel drawn to doing it more and more. For me!

So, nature, flowers, planting, horses, wilderness, it would seem, are my magnet. 

But the lazy streak, my frozen parts, are dragging and exhausting me and so fulfillment of my plans will take its time. I will have to accept these two parts for now. I am indeed afraid of the frozen parts. Do they hold unfathomable, unbearable grief? - an acceptance I cannot yet accept, like the ancient deadly viruses that are to be unleashed from the now melting ice caps? Will they be no worse than what I have already endured? After all, it is me that put them there.

The tasks I have to do are for now leaden and undoable, they require creativity and a persistence of gusto which I can’t seem to access.

And so I soldier on, dragging a Stonehenge of frozen parts in my partial fluidity.