A Color-Coded Life

(Re)learning the difference between reaching and grasping.

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“So, is it specifically your sense of identity and value in our family that you’re questioning or just the load of everything right now that you’re feeling overwhelmed by?” my husband asks in a soft voice, his attempt at dissolving my rage tornado beginning to barrel through the start of our weekend.

“Um… both?” I reply in question, tears springing, yet again from the corners of my bagged eyes. “Unequivocally both. Yes. All of it,” I add, more certain as words start to form, slowly but surely, out of the chaos.

That morning, I’d gotten my online grocery order all ready for pickup: a cart piled full of food for all the lunches and snacks I’d start prepping for our big week. While adding and adding and adding to cart, I was mooning over the nondescript ClickList attendant who’d so carefully hunt down what we needed, fill bag after bag, and then lovingly set them in the back of my car later that warm afternoon before they were unloaded, at home, by five pairs of hands in a kitchen where I’d meal prep to pop music and bask in the glow of our bountiful fridge.

My list was so carefully organized, and even, ahem, color-coded.

Though there’s a lot I can’t make sense of right now, in this new season of life, I can make the heck of some sense out of colors. Creating order just so, repeating patterns in my brain I’m convinced are the answer to hacking peace. The exquisite joy of giving each “area” or “person” in my administrative task list life, a color — is living. I mean, it’s near heaven!

Except, when it’s not.

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You know how someone once said the definition of insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again expecting different results? I don’t always think it’s true, but on this particular Saturday morning, I’d believe it.

A month before, my Kroger account was hacked and used to buy groceries in Virginia (HOPE YOU ENJOYED YOUR *bleeping* SALMON, KEEM). Despite immediately changing the password and removing my now defunct card information, I’d only just found myself brave enough to try another online order.

Only to discover, after trying again and again to add my new card, getting on an abysmal app chat, and too, waiting on hold for a customer service call that ended up dropping me — that my account had been fatally compromised.

The Kroger account I’ve had for my entire adult life, gone in an instant.

And my candy-coated, color-coded dreams right along with it.

“I’m just trying to do this one thing to make life easier for everyone, right now, and I ended up making it harder. All this time I’ve spent trying to fix this and I could’ve been to the grocery store, shopped, and back again,” I said, between sobs.

Then it hit me.

It’s not just this one thing. It’s everything. It’s the binders and notebooks stuffed in the kids’ lockers color-coded by subject. The meal plan color-coded by theme. The weekly schedule color-coded by whom the activity belongs to. The month calendar color-coded by the same. And it’s not just color, either. It’s the iron-in labels and snapware and, and, and.

These are not, in and of themselves, bad things.

Some of these are habits I have used healthily throughout the years, keeping my head on straight with three kids and all that comes with them. Clothes, lunchboxes, homeschool lessons, club soccer trainings and games, appointments and more. There’s nothing wrong with being organized, and in fact, often we reap the benefit of some of these systems. Color-coding has been a gift.

But the problem is when I start to think all of it will save my life instead of complement it. That it will bring me peace instead of giving me space to sense it. That it will make things easy instead of growing my capacity to face what’s hard.

And I’m in that problem space, grasping at our new reality instead of reaching towards it.

Reaching, to me, is offering support, guidance, meals, comfort, encouragement, help, space, company, plans, and more, that may or may not be needed but that come from a place of creativity and curiosity.

Grasping, on the other hand, is akin to everything above, except layered, often thickly and sometimes invisibly, with layers of desperation, fear, and maybe even sadness.

The point is, they look very much the same and feel entirely different.

I like the freedom that comes with reaching. To not be surprised that things aren’t magically solved by systems. To know that I can try and fail and then still keep trying — or not. To hold my hands open — a gesture of giving and receiving — instead of clenched and white-knuckled.

On the other hand, I could give you a million reasons why I’m particularly practiced at grasping. Or why I may never entirely rid myself of that coping mechanism. Or what, I’ve recognized, it’s taken from me over the years to try, try, try to control so many things in my life.

But I won’t. Because you probably have a million of your own reasons that are very much the same, and you get it.

So instead, I’ll remind us both of this:

It’s okay to put down the highlighters, friend.

It’s all gonna be (or might not be, but it’s okay) okay.