Writing

I am in the middle of moving, over Christmas, with a one-year-old baby, and I don’t wanna. I mean, I do—it is an amazing gift to our family to be able to move from our cramped townhouse into a beautiful house with a huge yard for our very active son to play in. We are thrilled and I want to cry. There are many reasons for this. First, moving is just hard—regardless of your circumstances. It is laborious, tedious, expensive, and fraught with details that would drive anyone mad. Second, it means change—deep change. And for those of us who like comfort and routine, this change can be undoing to the core.

For the next two weeks, Cathy Loerzel, Executive Director of The Allender Center, will write about the before and after of childbirth—a difficult, life-changing process that has increased both her capacity for love and her tenderness to pain.

These past 18 months have been hard. Hard on a personal level, hard on a professional level, and hard on a collective level. The pandemic has disconnected so many of us from the embodied wisdom of community, friendships, and relationships. We have needed to be physically removed for safety, but also we have been separated based on ideologies and deep skisms that have life and death seemingly attached to them.

Last week, Cathy Loerzel, Executive Director of The Allender Center, wrote about the before and after of childbirth, reflecting on the emotional impact her newborn son has had on her heart. Here, Cathy shares about the nature of that impact—one that has made her more tender to both the pain of abuse and the beauty of goodness.

A few years ago on New Year’s Eve I sat around a room with friends and we began to talk about our hopes for the new year. As we talked, I began to ponder the idea of change. Can we really change after a certain point or are we stuck in time, having lost our capacity to bend and mold as we could when we were younger?

In the chaos and urgency of tragedy, it is difficult to slow down and allow ourselves to grieve. As our adult self makes decisions and takes action, can we still let ourselves feel the sadness, fear, and loneliness of our inner child? That was the gut-wrenching challenge faced by Cathy Loerzel, after a personal tragedy struck in the summer of 2015.