For the past week I’ve had what feels like the emotional equivalent of a lump in my throat.  It’s that feeling of trying to hold back the flood of tears that threatens to breach the dam at any moment, even though you don’t know exactly what’s wrong.  Part of it is the late-autumn season which, for me, always hangs ripe and heavy with endings and goodbyes.  A few weeks before my mother died, at just this time of year, a friend’s husband died suddenly.  Although he had been sick he was very young, and the final chapter of his short life was not drawn out but abruptly slammed shut.  His death rattled me; it felt as if anything could happen, that life could pivot on a dime at a moment’s notice.  I remember sitting in a wood-paneled coffee shop near my apartment, the golden light of a late fall afternoon streaming through the long windows, and writing in my journal, “I feel as if the other shoe is about to drop.”  That’s a little what this feeling is like, as if my intuition is tuned into something that I can’t yet perceive rationally, its shadowy form lurking just beyond the horizon.

Abra is not a conventionally “easy” baby.  There are many days when she awakes in a bad mood for no apparent reason.  Today is one of those days.  I place her in the crib for her morning nap at the first sign of sleepiness, and she immediately began wailing.  Normally one to settle herself down quickly, her cries quickly escalate to frantic-sounding sobs.  I gently pad into the darkened room where she stands in her crib, her red, tear-stained face a crumpled mess.  I pull her from the crib and settle her in my lap on the creaky rocking chair, shrouding her in a soft blanket.  I think this will help.  These are the things I see mothers doing in movies and television shows, and it always works.  And maybe, if it was another Abra on another day, it would.  But today she will have none of it.  Instead, she alternates between nuzzling her head in the scoop of my shoulder and writhing like a caged animal.  She cries harder; I am making this worse.  After going through the typical assessment of what could be wrong and ascertaining that it is nothing obvious, that invisible dam finally ruptures.

As I continued to hold Abra – her sobbing, me gently crying –I realized that there is something scary and spiraling about emotions of an unspecified origin.  It makes us feel better to be intimately acquainted with the anthropology of our anger or sadness; otherwise, how do we make ourselves feel better when we don’t know what’s wrong?  Tears now flowing freely, I was overcome with a helpless feeling that there was nothing I could do for Abra, nor anything I could do for myself.  I wasn’t sure what this emotional lump was about except to say that it was lodged in a place of old wounds that will never be fully healed, pustules that flare up now and again.  Although I don’t feel consciously sad or grievous, as I listened to a friend tell the story of a coworker who suddenly died in the middle of his office, someone I didn’t know, that familiar lump rose from its resting place in my gut.  I’ve been greeted by bluebirds nearly every day for the past week, which has long been a powerful symbol of my mother’s presence.  Each time they swoop from the trees or flap their brilliant blue wings in my direction that lump makes itself known.

Soon this season will pass.  I will survive another Thanksgiving – my tenth – without my mother.  Then the effervescence of the holiday season will swallow me whole and spit me out on the other side of the New Year.  The lump will eventually subside on its own.  But today the only solution, for both of us, is to wait it out.

I decide to push us out into the world.  Normally an extrovert, it’s been hard for me to be out lately, as if the glare of humanity, glinting off my tender emotions, is a simply too harsh.  Abra continues to wail from the backseat and I know immediately that I’ve made the wrong decision.  Ten minutes later we arrive at the museum where a few of my friends are waiting, happily playing with their toddlers.  Abra has calmed down by now, but when I go to extract her from her car seat she, uncharacteristically, begins howling.   “I can’t do this today,” I whisper to her, and as soon as it becomes apparent that we are not going inside Abra quiets herself.  I point the wheels of the car toward home, that dam leaking again.  By the time I pull in the driveway Abra is fine, and so am I.  We spend a quiet afternoon at home looking at picture books, going on a walk, making dinner.  Just as quickly as the storm moved to shore it blew back out to sea.  There will be other storms, bringing fat tears that fall from the underbelly of their black clouds.  In fact, there’s probably one already forming somewhere just beyond the horizon, gathering its dark skirts.  Some storms we escape, some we seek shelter from.  Others we simply weather.