Left

I confess. I lost myself for a while. When someone would ask how I was I would begin speaking about how the boys were or my mom or my husband. I have one friend who would always stop me and ask, “but how are YOU?” I never really knew how to answer that question. I didn’t know how I was. I didn’t know who I was. I lost her somewhere along the way during the last three years.

I have been a caretaker in some way for the last 26 years. It intensified 23 years ago when our son with significant special needs was born. It then intensified dramatically 3 years ago when he became very ill and spent a month in the intensive care unit. During that month we were told three times he was not going to make it. Thankfully, he and God had a different plan but we emerged with new medical needs. There are now medications throughout the day, intermittent catheterizations, diaper and dressing changes, doctor’s appointments and documentation. Our son is cognitively 3 in the body of a 23-year-old man with all the perils and potential hazards to be considered when caring for a toddler.

Being the caretaker of another human is a divine calling. It is a gift and one for which I fervently prayed, begging God to just let our son stay and to allow me to continue to care for him. Yet the awesome responsibility of another life and their literal ability to stay alive is brutal. It is exhausting. It demands all of you and then a little more. Getting lost is easy.

It is a different life and very difficult to offer glimpses to those who do not live in my world. So much of my time is devoted to tending care that it is far too easy to forget who I am outside of those duties. Without intentionally taking space for myself, I can get lost easily and without even realizing it because all I can do is what is necessary to get through each day. To me, a luxury is a shower or to eat an entire meal without getting up. Self-care is not going to the spa or a winery or attending a concert. In my life self-care is basic hygiene and some days I do not even accomplish that.

It is quite the conundrum. Some days it is an impossibility. I so intensely care for another there are days it is simply impossible to care for myself or others I am blessed to love. Relationships can be difficult to attend to in the way they demand or deserve. We sacrifice people and plans we don’t want to forego yet my purpose demands it.

In my experience, most of the time, life will gut you to get you to remember who you are. It will strip you down. It will seemingly mercilessly distill you to the basic element of who you are.

When I was in college, I had an organic chemistry professor who could not get across to the class the importance of distillation before we began the experiments. It was a night class and most of us had full time jobs. To us it took too much time to do the extra steps. We were already tired from the day. No one wanted to be there a moment longer. It didn’t matter much for the integrity of the course we needed to make sure what we were using was the purest substance and how it was intended to be.

Distillation is an imperative step used “primarily to separate substances from the mixture to allow for purification or the concentration of a desired component.” It will rid the solution of any potential compounds not necessary for the goal to be achieved. One night our professor intentionally contaminated our solutions so if we did not go through the distillation process, we would conclude the incorrect answer. Every single person in my class that night got the lab wrong. To each of us he simply said, “It must have been contaminated.”

The distillation process takes heat. It takes time to get to the boiling point and to get rid of what does not belong. It takes patience and waiting during the process. But once all of those unnecessary contaminants are gone, the element we are testing is reliable. It is true. It is pure.

I sit on my couch on a sweltering hot day. The temperature outside is frigid compared to what it feels like in my soul. This was not a voluntary distillation. Life does what life does. Boiling points have been reached. That which does not matter melts away and I am left with inspecting the elements that are left in their purest form.

Raw. Pure. Painful. Beautiful. Unimaginable. Overwhelming. Necessary.

I remind myself the distillation process does not obliterate. It gets rid of the residue. It tests other components. It allows you to separate and discard. It voids contaminants. It is re-birth.

The distillation process rids me of beliefs about who I am which I have picked up along the way. Some of them were true yet I want, I choose, to leave behind in the residue. Some were never supposed to be part of the compound. They were not mine to hold and could only harm me.

I look in my flask. I see what is left. It is all those things no one can take from me and I only lose when I give them up.

Love. Integrity. Faith. Hope. Purpose. Peace. Truth. Determination. Perseverance. Gratitude.

The process also rids me of names thrust upon me by others and by myself. They are contaminating lies. And so, I cling desperately not to who others say I am or even who I say I am. In my flask all that is there now is who He says I am.

Beloved. Precious. Worthy. Loved. Redeemed. Accepted. Chosen. Child. Heir. Known. Masterpiece. Temple. Justified. Sanctified. Conqueror. Light. Friend. Creation. Created for good works. Family. Strong. Overcomer. Blessed. Blameless. Sealed. Complete. Hidden. Raised. Free. Victorious.

I stand up off the couch. I take a deep breath. Gratitude fills my being. Distillation is a gift. It is in the letting go we are left with all we ever actually needed. My list and your list are the same. Our truths are endowed by our Creator as we were stitched in our mothers’ wombs and they are irrevocable. No amount of loss, heart ache, trauma, worry, anxiety, or difficulty changes what you and what I will find at the end of our distillation process.

Because at the end of our prayers regardless of whether God has said “yes” or “no” is new life, a new opportunity to begin again building upon the blocks of what is mine and who He says I am. That is a pretty good place to start, I’d say. And so I do. One step ever onward.