Rising from the Ashes (Independence Day)

When I lived in Miami, I began seeing a therapist at the suggestion of my fellowship program director, due to a comment I made about being happier if I were not a mother.  While I adored my very son, that statement was still true at that time in my life, so I agreed.  Certainly, the challenges I was experiencing were significant and my ability to cope with them was limited.  At some point during our association, which lasted the full two years I stayed in Miami, this gestalt therapist asked me to ponder the following question: "What does I mean?"  

If you take away Tara the mother, Tara the wife, Tara the doctor, the surgeon, the daughter, the sister, if you remove all the labels - what is left?  What is my essence? What makes me authentically me?

It was a question to which I did not have an immediate response at the time.  It took me many months of thought to develop an answer, proving that I did not actually know who I was at that time.  I could not quite put my finger on it.  I had spent many previous years letting go of my essence to transform myself into something that I thought was successful in the current era.  In fact, I was quite good at becoming successful as defined by the modern world - I have always been an overachiever according to contemporary standards.  In order to succeed by these standards, however, parts of me were buried quite deeply and it took many months for them to re-surface once I started looking for them.   

The journey was not helped of course by the fact that I was still working 14 hour days, up with the dragon every 2 hours at night, feeling like I was still failing as a mom, though doing decently as a surgeon.  I am so thankful for all the support that I had during that time, from my husband, my parents and in-laws and friends.  They propped me up, kept my family going so that I could drop in and visit once in a while.  

One Saturday morning I was in savasana at the end of a rare yoga class on a precious day off, as I lost myself in relaxing, meditative music swirling around me.  I suddenly thought "THIS.  This is it.  MUSIC.  I am a person who loves music.  They will never take that away from me."  And so the journey began.  The next thoughts came quickly to me thereafter in the following days - DOGS.  BABIES.  WATER.  Things that inspire pure unadulterated joy in me.  These things cannot be taken away from me.  This is WHO I AM.   

However, in the past 4 1/2 years during my first full-time job in pediatric surgery, WHO I AM has continued to be buried beneath Tara the surgeon.  Tara the mother and Tara the wife have continued to take a far second and third place to Tara the surgeon, and though my family has been extremely patient with me and with my career, the tension I have experienced from my unhealthy prioritization of my work has continued to build and simmer, until it finally erupted around February of this year.  It felt like all the spinning plates I had been holding up, barely, for so long, began to come crashing down around me.    

Suddenly, the external trappings of my identity were stripped, brutally and cruelly.  The decade plus of training, for what now?  I have spent the past three months fighting this injustice, using every tool possible at my disposal, asking for help and grabbing on to it because this whole situation WAY exceeds my own skills and ability.  The painstakingly slow process of restoring my reputation will continue for months, possibly years, and I may never be able to return to the way I used to be.  

In the past month, I began reading Untamed, by Glennon Doyle, which eloquently describes the burning and rising from the ashes of a truer, more beautiful, more authentic life.  The very engaging prose in the book hooked me, enchanted me, made me dream of what my personal phoenix could look like.  

And then this past weekend, on July 4th, I heard (again, but it felt like it was for the first time) this interlude from Moana which can be found in the video clip below.  

Here's the link just in case: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f81_F16rDlI

In the ensuing week, I watched it over and over, enthralled, at times tearful.  I was obsessed.  I could not stop playing it over and over.  I am Te Ka, the seething, burning lava monster.  They have stolen the heart from inside me.  I am enraged, in agony.  But I am also Moana, the softly singing voice that stands straight and sure and tall and says "This does not define you."   I felt seen, I felt liberated, freed from the cage of the accusations against me.  This story will be continued, but this is today's ending:  I will rise!  You who think you have torn me down have only given me the material to rebuild myself bigger, better, stronger, more true.  

I can't say it much better than the great poet, activist and award-winning country music icon Martina McBride :)

Let freedom ring

Let the white dove sing

Let the whole world know that today is the day of reckoning

Let the weak be strong

Let the right be wrong

Roll that stone away

Let the guilty pay

It's Independence Day!