We made a quick trip to my mom's this past Saturday-Monday. Her birthday is this coming week, so I suppose it was for that. The Feipel's went on Friday and came home Sunday, so we overlapped a couple days.
We didn't do much other than the usual. We all worked in the yard Saturday and did a lot of the "fall" stuff (rake leaves, put summer decorations away, flip bird baths, clean gutters, etc.). Jane spent quite a bit of time with her brother Keith. Jane and I also had a nice visit with K & T on Sunday.
Sometimes these trips are relaxing and other times they can be stressful. This one wasn't so much either for me. It was weird. I mean, for the most part, as far as everyone at the house, it was quite relaxing. However, on the way there I started having all sorts of old memories come storming back into my head, and they persisted. I was therefore feeling a lot of anxiety. Fortunately I was able to recognize it and speak to it (so to speak) for the most part. Still, it seemed a bit odd to me that I was sensing the feelings so much now, especially after not really noticing them in awhile.
Ironically, on Sunday I read Scot McKnight's substack dealing with Laura Anderson's new book on trauma. While the trauma I was sensing wasn't church related, I still resonate with her conclusion that: “trauma is not the event or the thing that happened to us; rather, it is the way our bodies and nervous systems respond to what happened to us.” So, really, it's not like we have a 'traumatic event' that we need to heal, but there can be an event or events that trigger trauma in our bodies over and over (another of her findings is that trauma is experienced in the body, not the mind).
Anyway, it was an otherwise good trip, and the scenery was quite breathtaking what with the changing of the leaves...
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