Pool of Tears

Alice cried a pool and nearly drowned in it. So did I

When we left Alice In Wonderland, she was still holding the Cheshire Cat’s grin. The smile that stayed after the person was gone. That was the cost showing up, the years of being present everywhere except where it mattered, and I told you the rest of that bill came due later.

This is later.

Alice has been falling and climbing and talking her way through Wonderland this whole time, chasing a garden she saw through a door too small to fit through. Curious. Then brave. Then wrong, and brave again. She has grown and shrunk and grown, changing her whole size to get through each room the place put in front of her. That’s the story we’ve been telling. A girl who kept remaking herself to reach the next door.

And now she’s in a room she made herself too big for.

It’s a small room. A table, a key, a little door too small to fit through. She eats something to change her size, the way she always has, the way it always worked before. But this time she overshoots. She grows and grows until her head hits the ceiling and one arm is out the window, and the room that held her fine a moment ago cannot hold her at all.

The room didn’t change. She did.

And this is the thing nobody warns you about the climb. You build yourself bigger and bigger to survive each room, and it works, until the day you look up and the walls you fought your way into are walls you no longer fit. You can’t un-grow. You can’t shrink back into a place you’ve already outgrown. She is stuck at the ceiling of the exact room she worked so hard to get into.

So she cries.

And the water rising around her feet is hers. She made it. Big, real, unstoppable tears, the kind that come out of something that broke, and they pool and rise the same way everything else in her life rose. By her own hand. She didn’t fall into a sea. She flooded the room herself. The cost of the climb, finally collecting on the floor.

Then she shrinks. Small again. Small enough to slip. And she falls into the pool she made, up to her chin in her own grief, and for one confused second she thinks it’s the ocean. Something happening to her. It isn’t. It’s hers. All of it. Deep enough to drown in.

So she swims.

Badly, at first. Everything that got her up to that ceiling is worthless now. You can’t climb water. You can’t out-grow it or out-muscle it or hold yourself above it by being the biggest thing in the room. The pool doesn’t care how far she came. It just holds her at the chin and waits to see if she’ll move with it or go under.

So she moves with it.

And she is not the only one in the water. A mouse paddling near her. A bird, then another. A whole crowd who fell into the same pool, all of them wet, all of them swimming, none of them alone in it. Even here. Especially here.

They reach the bank. All of them. Shaking and alive.

And on the far side, past the water she had to cross and could not go around, is the garden. The little door. The green she’d been trying to reach this whole time.

It was never up. It was always across.

She just had to get through the water first.

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After my divorce, my career continued to take off. I was traveling the world, closing big deals, earning a significant income. By the time my daughter was in middle school, I was a senior sales leader at a major tech company. My reputation was growing. The deals got bigger. The rooms got bigger. I was meeting with executives from every major enterprise in the Bay Area.

I can’t share her personal story. But the years between middle school and high school were deeply traumatic. School started to suffer. Her anxiety grew. Over time we were locked in a mother-daughter struggle. Constant push and pull. When Covid hit, everything got infinitely harder, and there was a situation that changed our lives forever.

Holding my daughters hand on one of the hardest nights of our lives in 2020

I couldn’t be dead inside any longer. I couldn’t be half in and half out. I needed to face my own trauma and grief. For her to heal and move forward, I needed to step all the way out of my own needs. If I didn’t change, I knew I would lose her. For over a year I was broken into a million pieces. Waffling between grief, guilt, loss, and deep, deep sorrow.

Being the tech sales leader, the bold one, the fierce one, was not needed right now. I couldn’t Olivia Pope my way through this. I cried. I broke every day. But I knew with every fiber of my body that I had to go through it. I didn’t have a choice, and neither did she.

It was also covid. And wildfires that had us evacuated for a week while our little community burned and loved ones lost their homes.

What I didn’t realize was the power of the people around me in those moments. The people who showed up for me. Who showed up for my daughter. I started to share my feelings. I started to let go of the notions I had about what life should have been for the two of us. I started to see her for who she was and what she was living through. I started to see the lights in both of us, the ones that connected us. I felt our bond come back. I watched her fight with every fiber of her being to persevere.

Just like Alice, I had to swim with it. I had to see the people in the same pool of tears. I wasn’t alone.

I made it to the other side. Just like Alice. But the most incredible part was seeing how much of an impact I had on her. How much she needed me to change. How she needed me to free myself so we could both move forward. And now I cry all the time - especially at sappy commercials. Guess I am not so dead inside anymore.

In the reflection I’ve done in the five years since, seeing what she has accomplished in her 23 years, I am blown away.

The three things we named in the Cheshire Cat post bloomed in this garden. But not the way I thought. Two of them I planted without knowing. Protect your energy. Rely on yourself. The third one I never planted at all. Keep your heart open anyway. That one grew on its own. In her, as a counterweight to my hardness. In me, only after I let myself break in this water. It was the last thing I learned, not the first thing I taught.

Now we come to this field of flowers. The one we had to almost drown to get to. In the final set of stories from Alice, we’ll walk through this garden and meet a few of them. Tiger Lily. Violet. Larkspur. Daisy. Each one a seed that bloomed on the far side of the water.

And then there’s the Rose.

The rose has followed me my whole life. Long before I could have told you why. I reach for it without thinking. The scent I pick up off a shelf without reading the label and only realize later. Rose. Again. It’s in the things I wear, the things I light, the things I keep near me. Some part of me has always known its way back to it.

The rose runs through Wonderland the same way. Start to finish, it’s there. It doesn’t arrive at the end. It was always in the story, waiting for Alice to be ready to see it.

That’s why the rose is the one I’m closing on. It’s the last flower in this garden, and it carries the most. A rose grows slow. It grows guarded, thorns and all, and then it opens anyway, in its own time, because that’s what it was always going to do. You protect yourself and you open anyway. You come through the water and you grow.

Not long ago I walked into a sound bath without knowing what it was. It turned out to be a rose ceremony. At the end they handed each of us three thorns and told us to carry them out into the world and release them somewhere in nature. Someday. When we were ready to let go of what they held.

I still have mine.

I’ve been carrying three thorns, waiting to be ready. And I think ready is close. So here’s what I’m going to do. The moment we reach the Rose, the last flower in this garden, I’m going to take those three thorns into the mountains and let them go.

The rose is the bloom that carries us out of the fantasy and into the life I have now. Out of Wonderland. Into the real garden, the one I’m still standing in, still tending. This is where you and I sit down together. Where we stop walking through the story and start talking, straight, about the things worth building a community around.

The rose was always here. So were you. We just had to get through the water first.