Spoiler Alert: It's a Downer

It poured last night. I used to enjoy few things more than a good soaking until a couple of weeks ago when my roof leaked. Now I watch the gray ceiling and storm clouds approaching with serious butterflies in my stomach.

In all my years, from crappy apartments and duplexes to fairly nice houses, I’ve never had rain water dripping inside my house. It was a gloomy Sunday afternoon, in a place where I know no one except my realtor. It unhinged me in a way that was shocking. I wanted nothing more than to get in my car and head to the safety and security of the Bay. But I couldn't... because my roof was leaking.

I’m back to the love/hate relationship with fall. Driving home from the Bay Area late yesterday afternoon, forgetting about the time change, it was almost dark—and already lonely—when I pulled into my garage. Note to self: Drive home from now on in the middle of the day. I was already in a terrible mood. My women’s group is going shitty. Transference and Projection, the psych 101 twins, have thrown us all back into the chaos, abandonment, abuse and pain of early, early childhood. All of us with our humungous mother wounds practically bleeding on the beige carpet, going for each other’s throats, thinking somehow that will assuage the overwhelming, and I mean overwhelming-I need-to-kill-something pain. This morning it was all I could do to unravel myself from the fetal position I’d spent the night in. Then I pried my swollen eyes open and for the first time in years, turned on Beverly Hills 90210 reruns.

You heard me right. Kelly, Donna, Brandon. Smoldering Dylan. Mr. and Mrs. Walsh. The Beach House.

I started watching the show when my oldest daughter was fifteen and she wanted me to watch it with her. Anything to bond with a teenager. In a few months, she’d grown tired of it and I was hooked. Of course it’s fiction, crap soap opera-ish tv, but I envied them their friendships, their urban family. I still do. Same with Sex and the City. That tight intimacy of I’m-always-there-for-you friends. Their midnight calls to each other, Sunday brunches, the arguments and tear-filled reunions; swimming through the big sea of life. Together

I long for that kind of community. I always have. Though never more than now, when I feel alone and isolated so often. I’ve had quasi-groups. A work community I was never quite a part of. Church groups where I clearly didn’t belong. I tried PTA when my kids were in school. It fit about like a shoe two sizes too small. Even in my spiritual community, I more often feel like an outsider, than one who truly belongs. I read people’s blogs who seem to have everything anyone could want: meaningful work, a family their life revolves around, garden, art, friends, community. A sense--an actual fact of--belonging.

Ugh.

I keep trying to make meaning out of this time in my life. When I face each day as a long highway with no stops, nothing to do, see, accomplish. Nowhere to be. No one in the car for the journey. I keep thinking there must be some reason why now, at a time when one would think I’d need it most, I am so un-peopled.

Nothing to do, but be. A serious spiritual opportunity here, I know. And I do better with it some days than others. Some days, I welcome it. Some days I nearly throw my arms around it, pull it to me, and embrace it. It's just that today isn't one of those days.