Can I just say I’m f**king tired?

I realize I should be thrilled that my new anti-convulsant meds have started to show real results, that even my minor seizures have been under control for three weeks running, and that the whole epilepsy experience is starting to normalize into a sense of, well, boring and intermittently woozy fatigue.  Yay.

As someone aptly posted recently, it’s not cool to complain about your health on Facebook, especially if you can’t at least rouse yourself to an exclamation mark when things improve.  For me, a few moments lately have been truly celebratory.  Last week we toured around the Pacific Northwest to look at colleges with Marcus, and I re-tasted the sweet exhilaration of driving.    I’m not really supposed to take the wheel yet; but Beret’s spinal recovery is still too fresh to withstand long hauls, Marcus is too young for a rental, and I truly am feeling better – honest, doc.  So I took my newly-cleared head for a spin down the Columbia River Gorge in Budget’s finest Nissan Versa, nicknamed “Bitsy” (last spring when we toured New England colleges, we somehow ended up with a black Suburban we christened “Beula”).  It was an uncharacteristically clear day, and Mt. Hood kept looming in and out of view as golden hills gave way to mossy cliffs and falling leaves bigger than my hand.   It’s not PC to admit it, but damn, those hydrocarbons went down good!  We had some swell hotels too: the Clackamas Inn next to the quaint old porn emporium; the Tacoma Dome Holiday Inn with only hot water in the bathroom; and the unforgettable Walla Walla Travelodge where turning on the heater set off the smoke alarm and the glass shower door fell off its hinges.  Who did the booking, you ask?  Nolo contendere.

But now there’s a chunk of road ahead that’s not so scenic.   Transitioning out of a law partnership — even on good terms prompted by less-than-good circumstances — is still a breakup, and there’s no such thing without a few bloodstains on the floor.

More deeply, talking with our youngest about his next steps — over long conversations where Beret and I try to help Marcus fish his crystallizing dreams out of the kelp of our own past longings and fond memories — leaves me exhausted from anticipated loss.  My growing confidence and pride in his ability to make sound decisions somehow drains something vital out of myself.  Maybe it’s my illusion of irreplaceability.  For 21 years I’ve borne the sweet belief that my kids existentially needed me.  Soon, they will not – or at least, not in the same way.  I loved my own dad fiercely, and I grieved hard at his passing.  But I was an adult, as Paige is now and as Marcus will soon be, and so I was already accustomed to my father holding my heart from afar instead of guiding my hand from close by.   Of course he holds it still — just from a bit farther — as I will always do from my perch as my kids colorfully fledge and fly.

David Whyte wrote a great book called “The Three Marriages,” describing one’s commitments to a work, a spouse, and a self.  I’ve been beyond lucky to have had five – Whyte’s three, plus my commitments to a family, and to a place.  All of them must periodically transform, and the work of transformation often requires a different energy from what was needed before.   Right now I’m not sure what energy that will be, except I know I don’t have it yet.

I love the fruition of fall.  Last week I walked home from work a different way, along the bike path by Boulder Creek.  It’s been 13 months since our big Colorado floods, and at this time last year the path was buried under silt and downed trunks.  Now it’s clean, except for a few fallen leaves pressed into the concrete by the tires of whizzing cyclists.  The riverbed has recovered to the point that big trout again sway below big rocks, their backs catching shafts of light if you stop and look.  The only remnants of last fall’s rage are higher up, in the crotches of cottonwoods where tangles of sticks and hairy debris still hang, bleached and angular like the entwined skeletons of drowned lovers.  Perhaps the cleanup crews decided to leave them as reminders that, yep, the waters ran THAT high.

Farther along, I pass under apple trees practically collapsing under loads of so much fruit, the surrounding lawns littered with fermenting bear forage.  Normally the cops collect beer from weaving freshmen on weekend nights, but how exactly do you confiscate cidered apples from a drunken bear?  We had a bull moose in town this week; the authorities tranquilized and shipped him to higher ground for the offense of picking fights with labradoodles he mistook for wolves.  And yesterday a neighbor’s wildlife-cam caught a pregnant mountain lion hauling her belly up the street in broad daylight.   Kaisha and I jogged past the spot that afternoon, her nose twitching like a Geiger-counter.   I pulled on the leash, but she defiantly squatted to leave her comment on the urinary Facebook thread.   Usually by October, life here has begun its wither into dry grasses and crackling leaves.   But this year, thanks still to our flood-saturated water cycle, we remain green, plump, and almost muddy.

I don’t much mind my own property’s brambles of poppies and bindweed.   The berm we built last winter to prevent recurrence of the water entering our house (it’s axiomatic that engineering for a 100-year event should be performed in the 101^st year), remains unsculpted into anything you would call “landscaping.”  Wrecked irrigation tubes still protrude at angles from under surviving spirea shrubs.   Neighbors around us beautifully rebuilt their yards this summer, and when I mentioned to one that next spring we intend to scrape our failed xeriscape back to simple lawn, he practically wept with relief.  But I’m not stressing about it.  Recoveries take their own sweet time, like rivers.  The beauty of experience is sensing when to let the current take you, when to find your feet, when to stand.

Last week I began transforming my law practice, again.

I’ve been a litigator for 24 years.   In the popular imagination, that word more than half-rhymes with “alligator”.  New acquaintances have often remarked, “Gee, you don’t SEEM like a litigator,” meaning I don’t have obvious scales or a dorsal fin.  During my first years in the profession, I struggled with this dissonance myself, putting on my custom-tailored snakeskin every morning and shaking it off as soon as I came home at night.  I was working for others, and I felt I had to try to emulate what I heard as their hiss.  We escaped to Micronesia for a time, and that excursion brought our children, and documentary filmmaking, into our lives.  None of that emerging beauty seemed compatible with the crazy, wasteful, posturing business of litigation, and eventually I began plotting ways to become one of those “recovering lawyers” who ditch their wingtips for Birkenstocks and never practice again.  Which I did — or thought I did — in 2002.

It lasted a year.  The migration back to law wasn’t just about money, though we were indeed going broke.  Rather, during the time I was “not practicing,” I found myself drawn into the nastiest conflicts of my surroundings, wrestling with misunderstandings and bad actors, pulled back to the rivers of human spleen and bile that flow through the legal system.  I looked more closely at those waters and saw clotted trauma, treasure smashed to shards, hopes sunk beyond hope’s reach.  I watched people wading in after their losses, or shoved into the deepest places by ones they once trusted as family.  And I watched lawyers, diving after clients’ pearls, hauling clients to shore, fending off adversaries who would hold clients under until they drown.   Of course, the gyre fed sharks and gators too – fat, slimy and devious.  But others were lifeguards and boatmen, dam builders and salvage artists.  The best of them whacked the serpents on the snout, rescued both their clients and some share of their lost objects, and sequenced the recovered bits and pieces into a story that could be held up into the light, a kind of truth.

I realized too that my clients’ need to gather story as a means of recovering from loss mirrored my own.   I’d spent years sorting and sequencing shards and treasures of personal history: my mother’s private furies and public glories; the handyman rapist who tore my childhood and swore me to secrecy; the raised voices of my parents through my bedroom wall.  I understood clients’ need to live for a time facing backwards, sifting the ashes of a burned house, even years after the fire.   So I found a partner, and we started our own firm.  I succeeded for some clients and failed others.  It’s been a good run.

But ten years on, it’s time to change again.  My new decision is again partly about enforced circumstance, as I confront physical needs for more sleep and less breath-holding.   But it’s also the completion of a transition already underway.  I’ve been mediating cases part-time for a couple of years — working with Latino immigrant clients who need a Spanish-speaking mediator, people caught in small-scale commercial disputes, and couples struggling with circular eddies of post-divorce disagreement.   Some rightly distrust the unreliable promises of law.  Others have suffered and spent in litigation at least as much as the losses that first brought them to the courthouse door.   In mediation, I urge people to consider the option of pivoting away from their past and refocusing on their future.  A cliché of dispute resolution is that the disputants have to “let go” of their pain in order to “move on.”  Many experience this demand as an invitation to defeat, to add yet another loss to a losing history.   But I look for ways they can grab hold of a new life yet to be lived and emerge stronger and wiser, not hiding the scars of history, but wearing them openly as badges of experience.

As I told my colleagues in my firm of my new path, I felt acute pain at the prospect of renouncing a craft I’ve honed for almost a quarter-century.  But it’s time for me to take my own advice, and pivot towards my own future.  There’s light in that direction.