I was finally getting somewhere. The therapy and woo and Tarot and journaling were converging and I actually felt different. Opening gates and releasing old burdens, forgiving myself for times when I caved to self-abandonment, forging new neural pathways built on balance and boundaries and authenticity. You know. The usual midlife chrysalis stuff.
For a moment, I let myself entertain the idea that I was getting close to, well, graduating from weekly therapy. The day after the Flight of the Chimney Robin, I said to my therapist, with a lump in my throat, “I don’t think I’m ready to be done quite yet, but. . . I can see how far I’ve come and. . .” I couldn’t really get the words out, and she gently finished, “Maybe you can see that the work that has already been done is much bigger than the work that remains?” I nodded. Things were sinking in.
Right on cue, enter my fourteen-year-old daughter. “Did somebody order a super-triggering field test?” the cosmic messenger assigned to me asked. “Let’s put this shit into practice.”
If you are a perimenopausal woman raising teenage daughters, you may have noticed that it’s, um, activating. Midlife women handing the menses baton to their adolescent offspring is already a fraught endeavor—and then suddenly every shared trait and entwined narrative offers itself up for scrutiny through the lens of your inherited female lineage. Or maybe that’s just me (shrug).
It certainly is a fascinating time to revisit all your old teenage growing pains, explore generational patterns of internalized misogyny, and work on your boundaries—pass the progesterone!
My teenage daughter’s breakup had opened a floodgate of old emotions in me, bringing back my own adolescent turmoil alongside unresolved guilt from my divorce. Every broken heart, impulsive decision, and failed relationship of yesteryear ticked by like a macabre circus parade. Out of nowhere, my newly liberated robin-self was saddled with memories of guilt over being selfish or careless, years I stayed when I wanted to leave, the mess that resulted when I dared to actually leave.
Whether it was a fully grown husband or a teenage boy from church circa 1995 (the audacity!—who dares to break up with Church Boy to pursue someone more mysterious?) seemed irrelevant—it all blurred together like Good Girl Guilt Soup. I could feel the disapproval of every proverbial parent in existence—selfish, selfish, selfish, they whispered.
I’ve spent four years carefully extricating the good girl nesting dolls of my childhood, adolescence, and motherhood. I’ve unpacked all the ways in which I masked and compensated for undiagnosed neurodivergence by being smart, polite, and high achieving. I’ve pondered all the men whose comfort, feelings, and functional baselines I prioritized over my own, believing I *needed* a romantic partner in order to survive, to be safe, to belong.
I’ve chased rage with a shot of grief, mixed regret with acceptance, and come out the other side full of gratitude, a shitload of gray hairs, and the burgeoning perspective of a crone-in-training.
She knows who she is. She does not hide or mask or apologize or perform. She sets relationship boundaries—or ends relationships—without sacrificing herself at the altar of “don’t hurt anyone’s feelings.” Sometimes, this pisses me off. Mostly, it makes me proud. It’s what I want for her. She does not stay when she wants to go.
Treading lightly as always around “stories that are not mine to tell,” let’s just say my old frenemy “enmeshment” entered the scene. As years of conditioning around shrinking and politeness and what it meant to be a “nice, polite girl” flooded back in, Pavlov-style, there was only one thing to do: if my daughter wasn’t going to turn herself inside out with apology and martyrdom, I volunteer as tribute!
Happily taking up the burden nobody asked me to carry, I morphed into Jesus nailing myself to the cross, if Jesus were a passive aggressive Iowan—“No, really, it’s fine, you go enjoy the picnic; I’ll just be up here dying for your sins.” No matter how many years I’d refused to equate motherhood with martyrdom, it was in the groundwater. Listen, somebody’s got to suffer here, and it might as well be me!
Not for the first time, I wished there was some sort of emotional loan forgiveness, a pay-it-forward so my daughters could bypass lessons I had already learned. But the thing was, I was the one re-learning them. I was the one lugging around the old pain. They have different baggage. Confronted with my teenage self through the lens of my teenage daughter with a dash of “Well, goddammit, now I understand what my mom may have experienced,” I had some shit to release, by way of robins masquerading as shadow selves.
Ten days after the Robin’s Merry Chase, I created my Tarot lesson for the day. “Create a spread for me around the archetype of The Tower,” I typed into my browser. Let the MF burn! My subconscious chanted eagerly.
I pulled six cards, and of course one of them was The actual Tower. (There are 78 cards in a deck, so the odds were long.) For the Tarot-curious, this card represents structures that need to crumble. It can signify chaos and change, but rather than symbolizing a bellwether of destruction, it can be an invitation to allow something old to collapse. “The Tower can mark the end of self-betrayal,” one interpretation suggested.
Then came the Death card. Like the Tower, it can present as a “scary” card, but in reality, it it represents transformation, the falling away of what needs to die so that something else can be born. First, the Tower crumbles, then comes the rebirth.
Of course, I also pulled two cards distinctly related to romantic partnerships, inviting me to reflect on old beliefs I had about relationships, obligation, and being a Good Wife. The “happy couple” cards were upside down—which was precisely what I needed to do to some of my old narratives. It was hardly a subtle spread.
I went outside afterward for my usual backyard meditation time, but couldn’t settle in until I identified the squawking bird nearby. My Merlin app told me it was a finch—The fuck it is, I replied to Merlin. Finches are common visitors in my yard, and I’d never heard one sound like that before. I wasn’t even sure it was a bird, at first. Then I realized my dog was barking like a maniac. “It’s not a squirrel, dumbass, it’s a bird!” I called irritably. It finally dawned on me when I noticed Winnie frantically pawing at the corner of my daughter’s fairy garden: there was indeed a finch, but it was trapped, and those ungodly noises were distress signals.
I walked tentatively to the fenceline, trying to ascertain where the bird was. Following the frantic bird-screech sounds, I discovered that it was stuck in the cavern where rats once built a nest and tunneled into our crawl space. The bird was somewhere beneath the stone wall that marked the edge of the garden. What the fuck was up with these birds getting trapped on my property??
Naturally, I called my father, a mere 700 miles away, because… he likes birds? Listen, once again, I assumed a competent man would know how to solve my bird problem. He talked to me calmly, first commenting that the bird could probably get out on its own. “No it can’t!” I insisted. “You should hear it! It’s in distress!” He asked if I could figure out a way to get in, and I started to pull at the rocks above the garden. “I can’t get them loose,” I gritted my teeth. It hit me: This tower is not going to crumble.
My mom got on speaker phone. “Honey,” she began, “It’s so admirable how much you want to rescue creatures in need. But you’re going to hurt yourself. It’s the bird or you.”
“I was raised to put the needs of others above myself!” I blubbered, decades of self-erasure and patriarchy and the church cascading down on me, threatening to bury me in the dirt with the trapped finch.
“I didn’t raise you that way,” my mom replied.
Something in me shifted. My shoulders sagged. I was filthy, covered in mud, as were my dog’s paws. I realized that my mom was right. It was the bird or me, and I couldn’t bring down the stone tower. Maybe the bird was going to die in the hole, but I couldn’t save it.
When I carried my muddy dog into the house, the frantic bird-shrieking stopped. It finally occurred to me that perhaps the bird was not distressed because it was trapped. Maybe it was distressed because we were trying to “rescue” it. Our intervention—the barking, the digging, the attempts to save it—may have been the problem all along. I didn’t hear the bird again that day, or the next. I suspect it did find its way out; maybe it went into the hole on purpose.
Brushing the mud off my pants, the truth smacked me in the face: Every time I try to intervene in my daughter’s process, I deprive her of the chance to work through her own emotions. I derail her efforts to climb out of the hole. Every time my empathy takes a masochistic turn and I decide someone else’s pain is mine to carry, I take away their chance to find their own healing and growth.
I believe in clinical terms, that’s known as overfunctioning.
Not all towers are mine to crumble. Not all birds are mine to free.
XO,
Steph
Apparently, if you spend thirty days studying Tarot, talking to robins, un-rescuing finches, and accidentally uncovering your deepest psychological patterns, eventually you have to create a workshop.
So I did.
30 Days of Reading Yourself begins July 6 and is designed for curious women who want to use Tarot + journaling as a tool for self-discovery, creativity, intuition, and reflection. (Cough, NOT to predict the future, and this is NOT a “learn how to be a Tarot master” workshop!)
If you’d like to join me, registration is open now—and there’s a $20 early bird discount if you sign up this week. (Hey-oh, early bird; listen you guys I don’t write these puns, they write me.) Use this link and the code EARLY20—discount through 6/14.
I think you’ll be amazed at what comes through—and you may realize you knew it all along. Come join me! No bird rescue or writing or Tarot experience required. 🖤
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