the cracked open heart

when your heart becomes an insistent guide

As I was growing up, my mom taught us to take emotion out of our decisions. It’s one of my earliest lessons from her, “take the emotion out of it.” I was taught compartmentalization as a coping strategy and shoving emotions down as a survival tactic. In many ways, that worked. I made clear and fast decisions about what I wanted and didn’t want, even when I was young. When we went to restaurants and the waiter asked for me order, 8-year old me would immediately answer without even an “umm” before I declared I wanted the chicken pot pie.

The strategy carried me through adolescence. And then, of course, I started to get that familiar angst feeling. I believe that angst begins the first time you think, “I don’t feel like doing that".” And there’s that dirty word: feel. But I didn’t say that out loud, because feeling wasn’t encouraged, so instead I just didn’t do that thing that I didn’t feel like doing. I let my actions take the role of acknowledging my feelings. Little did I know at that time that I was starting to uncover a way of being that would stay with me in some form well into adulthood.

Because of my upbringing of no feelings acknowledgment, I stopped crying regularly around 8 or 9 years old. It’s not that I lived in a house where my mom would tell me to stop crying, but I did live in a house where my brother would tell me to stop crying, that I cried too much. So I stopped. I didn’t at the time see the real purpose in it, didn’t know that tears literally had an impact on the nervous system and the ability to regulate. Tears got shoved down with the feelings that caused them.

Me and mom, early 1987

What develops in a person who was not taught to feel is that they struggle to understand why others are doing so much of it. I struggled with empathy as a teenager, which — to be fair — I think most teenagers struggle with. But I have a journal entry from when I was 12 and had fully stolen my best friend’s boyfriend that said, “who cares, he likes me better anyway.” Yeah, it was the making of a monster.

As I grew up, I broke some hearts, but I had never had my heart broken. I would declare, defiantly, that I was not impacted when I learned that my high school boyfriend cheated on me. I was grateful he told me (after we’d already broken up, of course), and glad for the concrete reason not to consider a reconciliation. When he told me about all the cheating, carried out near constantly during our two year relationship, I was stunned and he said, “I win.”

When my grandma died when I was 13, I remember my mom sitting on the floor, knees tucked into her chest, back against the couch, rocking back and forth crying hysterically. And I just stood there and looked at here, blank-eyed, until my older brother told me to go hug her. Which I did, awkwardly.

I wasn’t a touchy feeling lovey dovey come to me to cry kind of gal. I went through a marriage in my 20s, and then a divorce and while I cried, and I grieved, I still held on in some ways to that steely ideal of not letting emotions get the best of me. My ex once stated that I, “wasn’t a real person.” I took offense (I mean, what a mean thing to say to a person), but in hindsight I know what he meant. I wasn’t connected to myself.

While I’d argue that I’ve always had clear intuition, and that I’ve followed it since I was a child, I wouldn’t argue that I had a healthy relationship with desire. With acknowledging what I wanted at a soul level and then going after it. Because to acknowledge what you want at a soul level, you must feel. And I wasn’t just not taught to feel, I was taught not to feel. Six years of therapy in my twenties started to crack the surface and go down a bit deeper, but there was still a rigidity rather than a fluidity to my connection with emotion.

One day when I was about 27, I was reading The Art of Racing in the Rain and I started sobbing at the end of the book. I’ve always been an avid reader, but I think that was the first book to make me cry. I remember sitting on the couch and feeling a swelling of emotion starting in my belly and rising up to my chest, feeling caught in my throat and then bursting forth with first one tear and then many many tears. After I was done, I put down the book, wiped my tears, and carried on, not knowing that the feeling I just had, the growing emotion that creeps up was a familiar one, I’d just ignored it or gave it no release in the past.

In the midst of my divorce at 29, I spoke matter of factly about the breakdown of my marriage. I wasn’t weepy. I was liberated. And to be fair, I really was liberated. I felt more free than I’d ever felt in my life, more relief than I’d known possible. It was a hard last few years of the relationship and to be in my own space with my own thoughts and feelings was a revelation. I’d only lived alone once before, my last semester senior year of college, and I missed it. Instead of my heart breaking, I felt like my heart expanded. I remember going to see Hamilton with my mom a few months after the divorce and her saying, “if you keep your heart open, you’ll be fine.”

Which was a very different tune from when I was a child and she told me to take emotion out of my decisions. I thought about her telling me to keep my heart open for hours, weeks, months. I couldn’t really believe she’d said it. She’d used the word heart in a sentence with me, related to emotion. My mom wasn’t an icy woman necessarily, but she was at least chilly, and was a single mom so she had to do both roles, work all the jobs, and survive. But she was gooey at the center, like all of us are.

In 2017, when I was 30, I took my mom on a trip to Ireland. She’d tracked down all of our family’s genealogy, a pet project of hers for years, and I wanted to be sure she was able to actually see where she came from. We spent 8 days driving around Ireland, visiting where she’d tracked our family to, eating in pubs, staying in gorgeous Airbnbs, admiring the stunning scenery, and walking along moody beaches and wild coastlines. It was the most stressful trip of my life.

Because, you see, when you’re raised by someone who has repeatedly (except for that one time) told you to take emotion out of everything, it’s terribly hard to connect emotionally with that person. I’d already begun my journey to re-connecting with myself, my whole self, including my emotional self and my body. She was like hanging out with a granite rock at times. I was on edge the entire trip, plus I had to drive in Ireland, on the other side of the road, and let’s just say I’m not the best driver even under the best of circumstances.

Me and mom, Ireland 2017

One night, at our Airbnb, we were finishing up dinner and drinking wine. We’d had a pretty lovely conversation because I’d taken to coming in from our day of adventure and locking myself in my room for two hours to decompress so I’d have the energy to have dinner. I looked at her as she knitted a blanket and asked her, “why aren’t we closer?” She kept knitting, her face completely unchanged, didn’t look up at me. Then after a few beats she said, “Because you’re a liar".”

I snorted a laugh.

“A liar?” what are you talking about?

Then she proceeded to tell me that because I’d lied about having sex when I was seventeen years old she could no longer trust me. Reader, I was 30 years old at the time of this conversation. She’d gone 13 years believing she couldn’t trust me because I’d lied about something I’m pretty sure most teens with a granite mother would lie about at 17. Especially since when the truth came out she told me that sex was forbidden and kicked me out of the house.

I knew I’d never fully recovered from that moment in our lives, but because I was resilient, on account of the no emotions thing, I bounced back. Graduated high school with a 4.6 GPA, got credit for all my AP classes, went on all my college visits, applied to colleges, paid my way and started university the following fall — all without her help or even presence. Not too shabby for someone who at the time didn’t have a fully developed frontal cortex.

I looked at her after I composed myself, and I said, “if you refuse to see the woman I’ve become, we will never be close” and got up and started to clear the table.

She just sat there. Knitting.

The next day, I asked her why she was the way she was. She said, “I had to survive.” And I accepted that answer, and felt immense tenderness for her in that moment as a single tear slipped down her cheek. Because she did have to survive. She had to keep us not only alive, but well taken care of. And to do that as a single mother on a low income the sacrifice is so often no only your time, and your health and your body, but also your heart.

In July of 2019, just over two years after I took her to Ireland, my mom died.

And finally, my heart cracked open.

Everyone has before and after moments in their lives. Before the big life-changing thing and after the big life-changing thing. This was mine.

Suddenly, I cried easily at things like the episode of The Office when Jim and Pam get married, or the episode of Parks and Recreation when Leslie and Ben get married — maybe I’m just a sucker for TV show weddings. But truly, I softened. I had no choice but to soften.

When the thing happens that cracks your heart open, it’s not the same as heartbreak. You can mend a heartbreak, sometimes you’re even harder after it because scar tissue forms and so your heart becomes less supple. But when your heart cracks open, it doesn’t go back. It stays that way. You’re flooded with feeling. Memories come back in a way that stun you and suddenly you can remember what it felt like to have your mom zip up your coat for you, telling you to tilt your chin back so she “doesn’t get ya.”

Once your heart cracks open, there is no more taking emotions out of decisions because your heart is your key decision maker. The one thing you need to get buy-in from before moving forward. It insists. It interrupts. It puts itself in the way of anything that is out of alignment for you. It forces you into a new way of being. I don’t mean in a “life’s short” kind of way, but in a “my heart will ring the alarm bell when I’m on the wrong path” kind of way.

I’m not sure how one’s heart cracks open without loss. I only know the way it happened for me. But I know that in the past six years of having a cracked open heart, I’ve chosen love, hugged my friends (no, I didn’t do this before), felt my chest expand while looking at a sunset, chosen a new career, chosen a new home, got my yoga teaching certification, decided to bet on myself in business, broken my own heart, put myself out there in the world, and chosen over and over and over to connect instead of isolate. Even though my earliest programming is still there, and when I’m in moments of stress or fear the first thing I want to do is to throw it all away. And by all, I mean emotions.

But my heart insists. I couldn’t be living the life I live now without my heart cracked open. And as with most things, I have my mother to thank for that.