The Timing

How do we know when it's right?

I’m not sure I’ll ever understand the ebb and flow of life, the stops and starts, the beginnings and ends. Why do some die too soon? And others live too long? What makes one say yes and another say no? What makes someone go? Why does someone else stay?

It’s the Sunday after Thanksgiving, and it’s eerily quiet here. Snoring dogs, an occasional bark, some car doors opening and closing outside. I’ve been reading and watching TV, vacillating between the Landman series and Virginia Giuffre’s memoir. Two very different storylines, but both about life and its never-ending trials.

When I was in second grade, we got a puppy we called Daisy. She wasn’t allowed in our apartment, so we had to sneak her in to live with us. She was my dream dog, the constant on every Christmas list next to all the other magical things from the Sears Wish Book.

But she barked and cried too much, and our neighbors complained. One day, I came home from school and Daisy was gone. I was inconsolable.

“I’m so sorry, Sweetie,” Mom said as she held me on her lap and ran her fingers through my curls, straightened my Catholic school jumper with her gentle hands. “I found a good home for Daisy, though. She’ll be so happy. The mother doesn’t work, so Daisy isn’t alone all day. It’s better for her. It wasn’t fair to expect her to stay by herself all day. She was sad. She was lonely.”

“I would have loved her through it,” I said, snot running out of my nose. “I would have made her happy.”

“You did make her happy,” Mom promised. “You made her so very happy. But you had school, and I had work, and Daisy needed people who were home more often than we were. The timing just wasn’t right.”

I thought a lot about timing that year. About how my dad fathered kids before he was ready. About how he might never have been ready. About how Mom’s second marriage only lasted six months. About how we never talked about it once it was over. How we never discussed how skinny she’d become or how sad she looked in all her pictures. The timing was bad then, too.

When my sister was a baby, she got a brain infection so fierce, it nearly took her from us. That happened before I was born, and she recovered and became my big sister, and she learned how to walk all over again, and she had seizures until she turned ten. We’d clear away the furniture while she shook on the floor. Mom would put a popsicle stick in her mouth so she wouldn’t bite through her tongue. And then Mom would hold Carrie’s tired, worn out body afterwards. She would rock Carrie in her arms, and I would read books in my bed, under the covers with a flashlight. Carrie needed comfort, and I needed escape.

Did that childhood infection make Carrie susceptible to the brain cancer that would take her from this earth 58 years later? Or was it all just bad timing?

A friend of mine was once in love with two men—her high school sweetheart and her college romance. “How did you choose to marry one instead of the other?” I asked. “It was all about the timing,” she’d explained. “If I’d have met my high school boyfriend in college, everything might be different.” I was perplexed by that statement. Wasn’t marrying someone about love instead of timing?

But it makes more sense now. Because both matter.

We need different things at different times in our lives. We are growing and changing and becoming someone new and different all the time. And if we’re not, then what, exactly, is the point of living anyway?

So, how do we choose who to walk through this life with? How do we know which path to take? Does it simply come down to timing?

Nothing, of course, is that black and white. Everything exists in grayscale. But timing is part of it. So is commitment. And love. And personal needs. And desires. And goals. And the capacity to grow and change with someone else. To hold and be held, both physically and emotionally.

Thanksgiving for me used to be filled with an abundance of family and friends. One dinner here, another there, and exhausted, overstimulated kids tucked into beds way past their bedtimes. It was chaos and gluttony and too much Pinot Noir. It was watching football until we were hungry enough to head back to the fridge for a turkey sandwich. It was songs by the campfire and bites of dessert snuck from disposable tins.

But the world turns and the seasons change, and nothing really ever stays for long. I talked to Mary Claire today as she was driving back to Olympia from Portland. I heard about the fun she had with her brothers, the arguments, too. I got the scoop on her new truck and her friends and her weekend birdwatching. She’s 25 now, but I can still see her in her Baby Lulu corduroy dress—the one with the falling leaves print and matching tights. She’d be covered in dirt and whipped cream by the time I snapped her into her carseat for the ride home, braids disheveled and turkey-themed bow long gone.

Wasn’t that just yesterday?

Time is a shapeshifter and a thief.

Today, I’m sitting with a sighing dog beside me, alternately relishing the quiet and missing the chaos. But I trust that I am exactly where I’m supposed to be at this point in time on this little blue dot, and as long as I’m able to take the next breath and the one after that, I’ll continue to make my way to wherever I’m supposed to be next.

I don’t always know where that it, but I’ll find it when the time is right.

I’ll be listening for the universe to guide me. And my gut, too. I’ve ignored her for far too long. I’ve sought wisdom from others instead of listening to my own needs.

Daisy is long gone now, but Sissy and Ruby are here. We’ve welcomed and said goodbye to Lucy, Maggie, Zebedee, Noah, and Esau, rodents too numerous to count, and enough betta fish to populate Shedd II. Mary Claire and the boys are adults now, living their own lives all the way across the United States. One remains just a mile away, but he is busy with his own life, busy being an adult, busy going wherever his life takes him next. Their grandparents are all gone now. My parents. So many who were here and who now are not.

Because that’s what life does. It gives and it takes. It guides us where it wants us to go. And we can fight it or give in to it, but we can’t stop life from life-ing. And sometimes the timing is perfect, and sometimes, it seems so impossible that we have to completely reimagine the next path, the one that’s so incredibly different than the one we had carefully mapped out in our hearts and minds.

But in the end, it will all be okay.

Because it has to be.

Because life will keep on doing its thing—bad timing or not—and we get to make the best of where it takes us. That’s the plan. That’s the adventure. That’s the reality.

That’s the promise of being alive.

And while I’m alive, I intend to be grateful for all of it, even if I have to wait until the tears stop flowing: For the love I’ve had, for the love I’ve lost, for the opportunities given and those taken away, for the chaos and the quiet, for the feast and the famine, for the pain and the pleasure, for the lessons learned and the questions left unanswered.

For all of it: Every excruciating, exultant moment in time.