“I’m so sorrrryyy you didn’t get the message…”

The rest of her nasally, drawn-out words completely lost on me as I tried to reorient to what was happening, our snow boots dripping salty water onto the 1950s linoleum.

One of my son’s daycare teachers rounded the corner just then, asking what was happening.

Confused, I tried to make sense of what our day would look like now. I had let her know in advance that my son had a 1 PM dental exam a half-hour away, and so I’d be picking him up early that day.
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Now, the 11 AM start time, which I was being informed of (while the roads were clear and the snow already melting) meant the couple of hours of work time I was trying to get in weren’t happening. Instead, I’d just wasted my time getting him up and ready for daycare (which, if you’ve had a toddler, you know is a whooole thing).

Monday was President’s Day of all days.
(Did anyone else’s soul just groan existentially into the abyss when you read that sentence?)
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So daycare was closed.
(In honor of… what?! The dismantling of our country’s integrity and our freedom?!)

It was a rare (and the first) eclipse of the season. The kind that stirs up paradox.
Mobilized energy. Impatience. Courage.
Right in the dead of Winter, when our bodies want to lie fallow.
(But this screenshot below sums up what my astrologer had to say about it.)

And we had a snowstorm here in the Rogue Valley.

I don’t know how you feel about that look in the screenshot, but when I saw her face, I felt it in my body.

The very next morning we woke up to our first (3-week late) snow of the season, which meant daycare opened 2 hours late.

I’ve realized now that a snowstorm just happens to be a great metaphor for an eclipse:

• One’s a white-out. The other, a black-out.
• One blankets us like a veil over the known. The other pulls that veil back in revelation of the “shadowlands” beyond normal sight.
• Both leave us with a sometimes eerie, awe-filled sense of quiet.
• And a chill in the air around us.

And this one in particular is asking us to somehow REST in the middle of the BREAKDOWN.

Because this astrology marks a new beginning full of paradox.
​Forward motion in the depths of Winter.
The end of the Sensitivity Cycle.
​Energy rising when the body wants to lie fallow.

I notice how hard it is to rest when systems around me feel unstable.
Like, vigilance is the only moral response.
Which means: a bracing against and then collapsing into rest.

By 12:15 PM that same day, we’d packed ourselves back into the car to try to grab a quick sammich on the way to his dentist appt. We only had time to stuff food into our mouths in a parking lot in the car for the 10 mins between the restaurant and the dentist's office.

About 1:25 PM, I was tearfully rushing out of the office with my baby in my arms, past the dental assistant laughing at the front door with her colleague.

He was having a trauma response to the dentist trying to look inside his mouth.

And Mommy got dysregulated being expected to keep him from touching anything and hold his mouth open against his wishes.

So, we drove home.
Me: repairing as best I could with my son to try to help him understand he was good and the whole scene was not his fault.
And me: taking big breaths with lengthened exhales and repeating to myself that I was safe.

He fell asleep.

I made one, last hopelessly optimistic stop at The Grange Co-op (our local farm store) to pick up the toboggan sled I’d put on hold for my son.

Apparently they hadn’t brought that kind of sled in from their other store location 30 mins away, where I had just been. They had essentially lied to me about “holding it.” *Bleep!*

The manager didn’t seem to care or want to make a sale. So, I left. The last unfair defeat of the day in my rearview.

I could feel it in my chest and my throat. That tight, armored feeling. Like if I just held everything together hard enough, the world would stabilize.

It doesn’t.

It just makes me tired.
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​※ Koa

P.S. In moments like these, I notice how desperately I reach for breath, sucking it in hard like I’m trying to oxygenate my way back to safety.

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