Lessons From a Bat Mitzvah Weekend

​​My stomach sank and I actually got a little light-headed. You know when your ears go buzzy for a minute and you see stars? I know it sounds dramatic but it actually happened. 

Our dearest friends from Los Angeles were on the other end of the phone telling me that their flight had been cancelled (along with 200 others into the NYC area) and that they had tried all day but they couldn’t get another flight out of Los Angeles until Saturday. My oldest daughter's Bat Mitzvah was Saturday morning.  

The irony? Their original flight was supposed to get them in two days early so our families could have some quality time before the insanity of the weekend. 

And now, they weren’t going to be able to get here at all.

Obviously we wanted to celebrate with every single person who we invited to our daughter’s Bat Mitzvah. But there were a handful - the kind Grey’s Anatomy refers to as “my person” - that we couldn’t imagine having a celebration without. And not just my husband and me - our kids too. And these friends - they are those people.

I hung up the phone on Thursday night and I cried. I couldn’t bring myself to tell the kids. I kept hoping it was some sort of fucking April Fool’s joke. That magically our friends would appear at the temple on Saturday morning. I poured myself a bourbon neat and I stared at it. It didn't even look appealing. All my reading on emotional agility and full-range of emotions took the appeal of the bourbon away. Somehow, I was smart enough to know that no amount of alcohol was going to ease the pain of the intense disappointment and sadness I was feeling. 

Disappointment is a brutal emotion and it’s not one that I’ve ever been very good at. In fact there are a LOT of emotions that, as of late, I’ve been working on “sitting with” as we say in the coaching world. In regular person speak, this means I don’t tell myself I’m ok when I’m CLEARLY not. I don’t drink the bourbon neat, eat the pint of ice cream, or buy the shoes in hopes that it will take away the pain. It means that when I feel the pain, I own it and let myself experience all the feelings that are coming. Sometimes it means yelling or punching a pillow. Sometimes it means crying until it feels like I can’t cry anymore. Sometimes it means sitting and breathing so that I can regulate my breath and the buzzing in my ears and the stars that I’m seeing dissipate. It means recognizing that difficult emotions are not “bad” but are part of the full range of the human experience. None of this makes these feelings feel any better. 

I’ve been reading and researching and working with the concept that emotions are data - information that helps us figure out what’s most important to us in our lives and allows us to get clear about what is and isn’t working. 

In that moment, the only data that was screeching through my brain was “HOW CAN I POSSIBLY CELEBRATE NOW!?!?!?” 

I was so scared that I wasn’t going to be able to move forward. I couldn’t imagine the weekend without them and yet, that’s how it was going to be. 

When I told our kids the next morning, they both burst into tears. They couldn’t imagine the weekend without our LA family either. As I hugged them, I said words to them that I was really telling myself: THIS SUCKS. AND - we’re going to have an amazing weekend. We’re so lucky to have friends that we love this much. AND they are with us in our hearts. Nothing can change that. 

I said it and I meant it, but I still wasn’t sure that my heart was buying it. 

Friday night, when our friends and family started to show up at our door, I wish I could say that I forgot about our friends who weren't with us. I most certainly did not. 

However, I DID experience every last ounce of joy I'd imagined as we welcomed our friends from Los Angeles and London and Atlanta into our home, as we watched our two daughters reunite with so many of their long-distance friends. We were so surrounded by love, it was impossible to not feel overjoyed.

The weekend celebration was EPIC. It might have been the best weekend of my life. AND there was a little hole in every part of it where our stranded friends should have been. BOTH things were true at the same time.

And every time I thought about them (which was A LOT), I said to myself: How lucky are we to have friends that we love that much?

It’s easy to read about, to study and think about the concept of being with the challenging emotions. But when it comes to actually doing it - it’s pretty brutal. I think, though, if I’d gone my regular route of trying to get rid of it any way I possibly could, I wouldn't have experienced that joy the same way. I don’t know that I would have been able to be present. Inside of the disappointment, I relinquished control. I had to surrender. There was NOTHING else I could do - and once I did that, it allowed me to clearly see the solutions to things that I actually COULD fix. Most importantly, it allowed me to experience the full, unbridled, overwhelming joy and love of the weekend.

So my greatest lesson from the weekend? It's possible to allow yourself to feel the full disappointment AND experience deep, DEEP joy at the same time.

If you want the intensity and beauty of the amazing emotions, the challenging and painful ones are part of the package.

Next time you feel anxiety or anger or grief or disappointment  and it feels almost unbearable, try to surrender and remember that you're not alone.