WAITING IS NOT EASY!

My son, Lou finally learns to read, the fires raged on, and how to hold everything at once in our big old broken hearts.

Dear readers: Thank you for your support, however it works for you. I’m happy to share that I’ll be posting weekly again, and there are some BIG CHANGES in store for 2025 so stay tuned. This week’s offering is a love letter from my heart to yours. May it be of benefit, and may all beings be safe, happy, healthy, and free. xx Alexa

Photo by Alexandru Acea on Unsplash

Last week, two days into the wild fires in California, my eleven-year-old son Lou, finally learned to read.

As I listened in complete disbelief as he read aloud, slowly but surely, from Mo Willems' simple but witty, and aptly titled Waiting Is Not Easy!, I was also waiting — selfishly, perhaps — for friends in Los Angeles to let me know they were okay.

Yes, I should have known better.

I have not lived through fires, but I do know what it’s like to be loved and to be overwhelmed by your phone ringing off the hook with calls from friends and family asking for updates in real-time.

Waiting is not easy.

We can’t help ourselves. The heart leaps to connect. It anxiously awaits instruction on how it should beat.

I’ve waited five long years for Lou to read.

At six, when most kids were learning, Lou was in treatment for his second bout of a rare form of pediatric brain cancer. The treatments saved his life, but they also scrambled his brain in mysterious ways.

Countless evaluations, battles with school districts, and emotional misunderstandings with teachers and other parents — ‘Your son said {insert something Larry David would say}’ — left us baffled and searching for answers.

How could a kid with the vocabulary (and style!) of a 76-year-old Oxford-educated antiques dealer not read a book, or the room?

We’d eventually find out that Lou was acting like George Constanza at his worst due to Traumatic Brain Injury, an umbrella term for a handful of learning disabilities, processing issues, and cognitive fatigue disorder, amongst other challenges.

In short, Lou’s brain has to work harder than most just to get through the day…he literally needs to take a break every 15 minutes to function…

The waiting was not easy!

But oh it was worth it.

As the texts from Los Angeles slowly rolled in (“We’re okay!” or “We don’t know just yet…”), I held the enormity of it all — the pain, the rage, the helpless feeling of watching from afar — alongside the hard-won joy of Lou’s milestone.

How do we hold everything at once?

When I was around Lou and his twin brother West’s age, I remember learning that the heart has four chambers. I’d close my eyes, and imagine the chambers as interconnected rooms, each one with a different purpose, like rooms in a house.

Where would I put the fear for my friends' lives and their homes, homes like hearts, where everything had a place?

And where would I put the never-giving-up on Lou, on West?

Was it all mixed together?

Waiting is not easy!

Sometimes it takes a while to figure it all out.

With that in mind, I thank you, readers, for giving me a moment to process it all, especially on the heels of the holidays, the New Year, and this moment in time.

Waiting is not easy, and believe it or not, I was at a loss for words.

That is, until Lou found them.

In the pages of a Mo Willems book, as my phone rang, and my heart waited for instruction on how to beat, how to feel…

A MEDITATION

My heart can hold many things at once…

Feel free to share a bit of your heart in the comments below. I’d love to hear about a time you held many things at once, or when waiting was not easy…

Sending you all my love, and much to come…

xx Alexa

PS. My heart remains with you California!