“Biscuit”
“When someone is walking beside us, we have more courage to walk into the unknown and to risk the dark and messy places in our journey.” ―
This week has been a little challenging for me. I recognize that in the past, it would have
been the kind of week that would have sent me into a tailspin, but today it
caused some bumps and discomfort rather than a complete derailment. I was talking to Joe this morning and was
able to see I need to allow myself props for how far I have come. I don’t give
myself credit enough and have to make it an intentional exercise.
I got some news about my mother this week that threw
me off. To be honest, any news about my
mother throws me off. I haven’t been in
contact with her for years and so any contact with or about her is jarring at
best. I have a lot of mixed feelings
about her to say the least. I also carry a lot of societal expectations about
what a good daughter “should” do and perceive judgement from others about not
being in contact with her. Of course others don’t know our story and don’t live
inside my head and didn’t live my childhood and I can tell myself over and over
again that I don’t owe anyone an explanation for my actions or lack thereof. Yet the baggage of the “good girls should”
still weighs me down from time-to-time. Understand I wish her no harm, in fact
I hope she is well and I still love her on some primal level. I just can’t be around her because it causes
me physical and emotional distress of epic proportion. I deserve to be happy and I couldn’t do that
when we were in contact and I also saw that having her in my children’s lives
was not going to be healthy for them at all.
Beyond this news about my mother, I had a few
instances at work where I began to feel like an imposter. I was challenged by a
few clients and this week it stung. I
wasn’t as able to not take it personally and I began to question my
capabilities as a therapist. My
insecurities grew inside my head and crowded out the work I know I have done
with clients who have made progress or whose lives have improved. Momentarily blinded by my affect, I made it
through the rest of the week by leaning on my colleagues in peer supervision
and talking through what I was feeling. In fact, I made it through the week in
general by leaning on others. I went to
meetings, I talked to my best friend, Tony, Frank and of course Joe.
This is what brings me to Biscuit. Biscuit is the family dog. She is a golden retriever we got in
2011. She lives at Frank’s house even
though I was the one who bought her at a charity auction (when I was drunk –
long story for another day). Frank is her person and she follows him
everywhere. She is loving and sweet if not too bright. She is an old girl now
and you can see from the picture, her muzzle is lovely and frosted. She is
going deaf and she has some trouble with her joints that makes it hard for her
to get up and down the stairs now. Frank bought some carpeted stair runners for
her so it’s easier for her to get a good footing and she has an orthopedic dog
bed on a platform.
What happens with Biscuit now is that she will come
down the stairs in the morning when Wren feeds her and lets her outside. When she has finished this part of her
routine she wants to go back upstairs to be with Frank but she gets stuck at
the bottom of the stairs. She sits in
the hallway and barks and complains until someone comes down and gets her. You don’t have to carry or lift her, you just
have to give her words of encouragement, walk up the stairs beside her and
sometimes place your hand on her back or pat her and then she can do it.
I realized that if nothing else, I do this week in and
week out for my clients and I do this really well. If I never get to evidence-based practices in
a session, or work on a skill or confront a fear or process a trauma… I ALWAYS
walk beside them. I always give them
words of encouragement and show them they can do more than they think they
can.
All Biscuit needs is moral support and it is what everyone
needs in life – it’s what I needed this week.
