Just What I Needed

I woke up with that knife-in-the heart feeling. “Dang it,” I thought to myself. “It wasn’t just a dream.”

I’d been waking up with the same feeling for five mornings straight. I felt it before I went to sleep, too. And when I woke up 2 or 3 or 24 times every night. And then I felt it pretty much around the clock, as well. I kept expecting a slight dissipation each day to show that I was healing with the passing days. But it wasn’t happening this time. I needed a pattern interrupt. I just couldn’t keep feeling this heart broken another minute longer.

Gracie had dumped me. It felt so out of nowhere. We had been dating for a few months and there was no full commitment yet, but it was heating up, and I had just written this in my journal:

“I don’t want to put the cart before the horse, but with the way things are going and the butterflies I’m feeling batting their cute little fuzzy wings delightfully in my belly every time she texts me, I think I’m on my way to falling for this woman.”

A few hours after committing that little gem to paper, I received this midnight text:

“I feel terrible doing it this way, but I don’t think there’s any easy way to say it. I have strong feelings for someone else. Best of luck to you in all of your future endeavors.”

Barf! Best of luck in YOUR future endeavors, too, Gracie, as long as they include the inevitable crashing and burning of your ill-fated relationship since you clearly can’t be honest enough with the people you're dating to let them know that you’re getting serious with more than one person at the same time!!

I opened my email and there was a letter from my attorney. My retainer was depleted and they wanted another $15,000 for the upcoming preparation and trial. I had been blocking out this little bonus feature of my sucky existence while dating Gracie and feeling like things might be finally turning around a little for me. But, time to dig my battered head out of the sand on that one and really get this depression party started.

The matter of my ex-husband and his efforts to take the custody of our two kids away from me was still very much the bane of my existence. In a nutshell, he’d wracked up such a big debt in unpaid child support, the con-artist could only think of one thing to do to stop it from accruing beyond the $85,000 he currently owed. And that was to legally become the primary parent so that I was the one who had to start paying child support. The kids didn’t want this. I didn’t want this. And I wanted to vomit thinking about all of the money we were both spending on lawyer’s fees when he could just pay what he owed.

Instead, he made up lies and dragged things on and so much for our kids having braces, cars or college funds. My youngest had just had an appointment with the orthodontist and time was ticking before her teeth straightening hurdles became much more complicated and expensive to fix. I didn’t have the $3,000 to get things going and her dad had said, “it can wait” when I pleaded with him to call off the court madness and reprioritize.

Then I jolted back to yet another financial crisis. My car was in the shop after having overheated on the highway and then sputtering to a halt as I exited. I had it towed to a mechanic and they had called yesterday with a laundry list of repairs necessary to get my only means of transportation up and running again. Another $2,000!

“I’ve gotta meditate,” I whispered out loud to myself and my dog, still laying in bed but feeling like I might not be able to move if I didn’t perform some sort of self-care miracle on myself. My teenagers were still sleeping and I wanted to pull the dagger out of my chest before they woke up so I could be their mom and not the emotionally drained zombie I currently felt like.

I browsed through some meditations on my phone, looking for something targeting “letting go.” I needed to release this stuff that had happened, was still happening, and that I had no control over. I put my headphones in and laid flat in a meditative posture, starting an inviting video from someone called “The Miracle Family.”

“I could use a miracle,” I thought to myself as the soothing music began, followed by a not-so-soothing voice saying, “Congratulate yourself on joining us for this letting go meditation today.”

I opened my eyes and cracked a smile. What the heck was up with that voice? It sounded sort of like a cross between the narrator on the haunted mansion ride at Disneyland and Harvey Fierstein. Whoever this person was, they seemed to have enjoyed more than their fair share of cigarettes in their years. Furthermore, they were modulating their voice up and down in what seemed to be an attempt at some sort of relaxation inducing auditory peace. There was no way I was going to make it through two minutes of this thing.

But the next thing I knew, I was in it like I had never been pulled into a meditation before in my life.

“You’re walking into a cool, damp cave. You hear the sounds of water dripping on the cave floor. The cave is lit naturally and you feel calm and safe as you explore.”

I was there. I saw the walls of the cave. I felt the coolness and dampness and the sense of adventure, but also peace.

“You look up and see a hole in the ceiling of the cave. You can clearly see the stars through the hole. One of them shoots down closer and closer to you, but you feel no fear because you know that this shooting star is your guardian angel coming to join you in the cave. And like that, there they are - your guardian angel - smiling warmly.”

And there she was, indeed. I had never given thought to my guardian angel before. I surmised that it was a neat enough concept, but I had never defined who mine was in my own mind; if I even had one. But there, in front of me, as clear as day, was my grandmother who I had been extremely close to, but who I lost when I was just 9-years-old.

“You hug your guardian angel, and you feel enveloped in calmness, strength, and love.”

And I did. I felt her arms around me, and I felt held and safe, like I was a little baby again. I could smell her perfume. I could hear her voice saying, “It’s alright, love. Everything is going to be just fine.”

The voice guiding the meditation continued, “your guardian reaches in their pocket and hands you a small black notebook, and a pen and instructs you to write a list of all of the things that are bothering you or holding you back.”

I took the pen and notebook and started my list:

Gracie

Custody Battle

Orthodontist

Car

I threw in a few extras for good measure.

Mouthy teenagers

Pandemic weight gain

Sciatica

“Now you hand the book back to your guardian angel, and they rip the list out of the book, crumble it up, and throw it through the hole in the cave ceiling. Your list flies up into the night sky and becomes a star. Your troubles may not be gone, but they are something that will soon enough, and forever more, be far far away from you; too far to even touch. Hard to even see on a cloudy night.”

Well, that’s nice, I thought. I get it. Good perspective. This is all fleeting and all these troubles will be blips in the grand scheme of my life. Message received.

And then something really unusual happened.

“It is time to say goodbye to your guardian angel,” the voice said. I felt a little bummed out. I wanted to grab on to my grandma and never let her go again. I envisioned another big hug, and it was again so supremely comforting, but she broke the embrace and handed the little black notebook over to me again. She opened it and pointed to a page.

On that page was her writing. I recognized it, because I had kept letters she had written me when I was a kid, and I still read them from time to time. But the information was quite unusual to be coming from her. She had passed away long before there was such a thing as the internet. And yet what she wrote in the notebook was a website:

www.protectioncreditunion.com

Protection Credit Union? Underneath the website was this:

Username: Mysweetgirl74

Password: alwayswithyou74!

The number 74 was significant, because it was the year I was born, and it was also her age when she died. These details were etched in my memory as I hugged her one more time and began my ascent back to reality.

“And as I count backwards from 10, you walk backwards out of the cave, 10-9-8-7…” I followed the directions of the voice leading me through the most intense and realistic meditation I had ever experienced.

“And as you slowly open your eyes, you feel a huge weight has been lifted off of you, and you are perfectly capable of taking on all of your challenges knowing that your load has been lightened by your guardian angel.”

I found myself smiling a beaming smile as I refocused on the ceiling and came back to reality. I looked at my dog who was staring at me quizzically.

“I went deep,” I told her.

I couldn’t believe how much better I felt. I would have to remember this “Miracle Family” the next time I needed some recentering.

Suddenly, it struck me like a ton of bricks - the website. The username and password. Just tricks of my subconscious, to be sure. Some sort of made up details that occurred as a result of this sort of dreamlike state I had just achieved. I probably had fallen asleep a little, truth be told. But just for the heck of it…

I walked out to the living room and fired up my laptop, inputting the web address I recalled. I was shocked when it turned out to be a real place. I was even more surprised when I clicked on the “About” link and found out it was just ten minutes away from where I lived.

Of course, I had to try the username and password while I was there, as silly as this all was. It would be a fun story to share with my kids when they woke up. “Isn’t it crazy how the mind plays jokes on us?” I entered the information I still remembered clearly from my grandma’s little black notebook.

I figured it was a glitch when it looked like the information actually took. I was sure the computer would whisk me away to a “username invalid” screen or something like that. But instead, it logged me in to an account.

An account with my name on it.

An account with a $20,000 balance - the exact amount I needed to cover all of these expenses hanging over my head. And somehow I knew this was no trick. No joke. Relief washed over me like a warm shower.

It still sucked about Gracie and all of the other nonsense, but there was no more knife in my heart. All I could seem to feel now was the arms of my grandma, my guardian angel, swaddling me with protection, love, and a very generous chunk of much needed cash.