Unexplained trips, secret phone calls from secret phones, sobs and panic attacks, finding out who your real friends are, all stuff I can relate to. So recently, when I finished reading Awake by Jen Hatmaker, a lot of these moments in the book hit me hard, bringing back a lot of bad memories. It's mostly about her journey through divorce and betrayal, including a religious and spiritual crisis, because she and her husband were both pastors and church leaders. The thing I appreciated about it was the woman's perspective on all of that trauma and recovery, but the further I got into it, the more I realized that those of us who go through these family crises live in very different worlds, depending on what class we come from.
For a lot of the book, I was right there with her. I could relate to the pain of losing a marriage, especially after so many years, the betrayal, the self-blame and loneliness. My kids were much younger than hers were when we went through it, so I had both of mine to guide through that process, even while I was going through it. Still, I see her sharing what it meant to have older kids, grownups even, who dreamed of engagement parties and weddings and babies who have married grandparents who still get along, and I get that too. I've seen some of that in my kids as they got older, the way they had to adjust some of their hopes and dreams, how first birthday parties can get a little weird, and I'm glad she's talking about it.
But then she gets to the part where she drops off her daughter, the only one still living at home, at a month long summer camp, and I start losing the thread. After that, she decides she's going to take a "Me Summer Camp," just relax in an old monastery-turned-resort for a month, really focus on quiet and meditation and journaling and get herself together. After all, she'd been through panic attacks and lost friendships, a whole career down the tubes and a real doubt whether she can ever enjoy church again.
That's where she lost me.
When I was going through it, like a lot of us, there was no question about taking off a month to meditate or relax or have adventures that might heal my broken heart. I had to work. Bills had to get paid, and a month of not working meant a month of no income. I was a teacher, so I had summers off, thank God, but I was also a single parent, which meant that I put the kids in day camp and worked a second job to be able to stay afloat and even take the kids on vacation a couple of times for the year. Divorce and recovery are very different for those of us who don't have the kind of money that allows for month-long sabbaticals, or even longer, considering that I still don't know what kind of steady work she was doing during those years.
And while I loved the passages about her friends rallying around her ("Girl, pack your bag, we're going to Mexico), that wasn't my experience. When you're not rich, most of your friends tend to be not rich also. I had friends and family who were there for me, supporting me, for sure, but not "take a week off and book flights to Cancun" type of support. I have friends who bring by dinner and call to see if I need them to make a playdate for the kids. She has friends who are world-renowned therapist celebrities or wealthy lawyers who ask if she wants to relax in their apartment in New York City for a few weeks, since they're not using it for a few months.
So how do the rest of us, the ones who have to work every day and take care of kids while we go through trauma, how do we deal with panic attacks and nervous breakdowns? It's simple! We just schedule them on our lunch breaks or after the kids' bedtime. We just do our jobs, with minimal dips in quality, so we don't get fired on top of everything else. We get in front of colleagues and students and clients and use every single bit of our emotional and mental energy to perform at an acceptable level, and then when the bell rings or the whistle blows, we go to a quiet little spot and fall apart, but only for forty minutes, because we have to be back on the floor for the second half of the day.
Or maybe we just forego the panic attacks altogether. Who needs them, amirite? Instead, we just live on the razor edge of sanity and deny ourselves the release that a panic attack would provide. We watch our hair thin and gray, watch ourselves get fat or skinny, shave years off our life expectancy and keep it pushing.
I was fortunate enough to get therapy during the worst of those times, and it was a lifesaver. It cost about as much as a week of groceries at that time, but it was one of the few things keeping me on track and moving towards healing. The day I got a health insurance plan that included therapy and counseling sessions for copays, I started going on the regular, like it was my AMC A-List account and I'm watching some Paw Patrol movie just because I have one more free movie this week and I'm not trying to waste my money. I don't even have anything to talk about, but I'm on the couch and the therapist is like, "didn't we put a lid on this four months ago?"
By the way, check if your insurance plan covers therapy and family counseling.
And when I say I was fortunate to get therapy, I really mean that I understand how fortunate I was. Not everybody has access to mental health care, even though everybody should. Maybe the difference between people who can afford therapy and people who can't is as big as the difference between people who can afford therapy and people who can afford month-long spiritual retreats in convents.
I think that's the perspective I wanted from this book. It could just be my general saltiness, but it seemed as if the book just normalized all these resources and reactions that seemed so extravagant to me. The way she wrote about the time off and the relaxing or distracting trips, the house with room for everyone and the world-renowned therapists on speed dial, just struck me as out of touch. I remember what it was like going through the trauma, and I hope she's continuing to heal from it. I also hope that nobody reads that book who's also going through it, who probably can't afford the luxuries she can, and decides that healing is unattainable for them.
