The Waiting Room

It is not a place. It is a state of being.

Published in “From the Vault”

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I am in a slick, amorphous, nondescript waiting room. A waiting room. Gooey and warm. The pink, translucent substance sparkles. All the edges are rounded. The large sweeping surfaces simultaneously appear solid and malleable, squishy even. You can sit or lay down without sinking in and feel buoyed at the same time. If I close my eyes and clear my mind, I can picture it. I can picture it like it was yesterday. Or today.

All around me are babies. All kinds of babies. Shapes, sizes, forms, colors. We are all just chillin’ in this waiting room. Hanging out. Being babies. No diapers. No clothes. No chairs. No cribs. No other people. Nothing and no-one. We are fully formed and embodied. Our spirit moves within us. We are who we are meant to be.

We do not talk or have deep conversations about the meaning of life. Or what this room is. Or what exactly we are all doing here. We are just here, together, waiting to be sent off to wherever it is we are called to be and do what it is we were made to do. Where or for how long is unknown. Somehow, I understand that. It is a deep knowing.

Out of nowhere this still small voice, very sweetly and gently says, “It’s time. You’re gonna go here now.”

Excited, I blurt out, “Cool! I guess it's my turn peeps, see ya later!”

The next thing I know, I pop out of the chute. I pop out of the chute and into the arms of the doctor in the delivery room. Game on.

A vault is generally thought of as a storage compartment for the safekeeping of valuables. It can also be an underground compartment, a burial chamber or a walk-in memorial to a life. Either way, it is a reinforced enclosure of some kind, made of either stone, concrete or metal. It is strong, hard, and impenetrable. And it is safe. In fact, by any definition, it implies safety and security by way of confinement.

As soon as my cosmic, joyful self understood that the world was not safe, I took the blueprints my mom handed me and built myself a vault so strong, so hard, so big that I could live inside it.

For most of my life, that was just fine with me. After all, if you did not notice me, you could not hurt me. Being inside that vault was not about living. Or pleasure. It was about survival.

Six years after my dad died, my mom moved out of my childhood home, a home in which my parents lived for more than three decades, raised three children and built a very successful business. When she moved into her new home, a newly-built condo a mile away in the center of the same Washington, DC suburb, she left almost everything behind, bought herself new furniture, and filled the shelves in her new home with her most treasured tchotchkes (including a large collection of angel figurines). Then she stored the family archives—a collection of yellowed, frayed documents, canceled passports and letters—in her closet, and hung pictures of her children, and grandchildren on the walls. In that space, she routinely gathered women for an afternoon Kaffeeklatsch, and hosted young students from Germany in her guest room. From that space, she traveled all over the US and Europe to visit her kids, grandkids, and friends. All the while, she continued to work in the business she had built with my dad.

What I did not fully realize at the time was that in doing all that, she drew a roadmap for a way out of the vault—not only for herself but also for me. Not that she said that, of course.

When I moved back to the east coast from New Mexico with my then-husband in 2014, I also moved closer to my mom. Now in proximity, she stayed at my house every Tuesday night and at least once a month, I spent the weekend with her in her condo.

During one of those weekends, one night as we sat at her dining table, drank a glass of red wine and played a game of Rummikub, she looked over at me and said, “Herzchen, life is short. Do not wait to do what you want to do or live the way you want to live.”

Recognizing that she spoke from experience, but also feeling utterly defeated by the current circumstances of my life, I replied, “But I’m exhausted...”

“I know.”

“Besides, I have no idea where to begin. I am not sure I even know who I am anymore.”

“All I can tell you is that even as a little kid, you knew things. Things you should not be able to know. So trust yourself. Do not hold back. And remember: you can do anything you set your mind to.”

“Mama, that is sweet of you to say.”

“Es ist die Wahrheit.” It is the truth.

There it was. All those years I spent running to the far corners of the world because I thought my mom had no idea who I was, she knew exactly who I was. And that night, for the first time I could remember and in her very indirect way, she reminded me of who I was; really, of who I am—a cosmic, funny and curious free-spirit who finds it quite natural to travel across time and space.

After all, that is what was I have always known to be true about me. That is what I knew before I left the waiting room.

When I pull stories out from the vault, it is not to live in the past. It is to honor where I came from, acknowledge what it took for me to get here, and choose the road I want to take next.