Today’s midday analysis from Notes from the Treehouse, followed by an update that arrived almost immediately afterward and changed the understanding of what the morning had been uncovering.
Midday Analysis – Solis’s Day
Sunday, August 23, 2026
By midday, Solis’s Day has already become a striking continuation of the question that appeared last night: Can safety exist without urgency?
What is especially important is that the answer emerging this morning is not simply “stay home.” It is much more complex. The family stayed home, and then the morning became a prolonged experiment in what happens when nobody has to force the body through a transition it does not have the capacity to make.
The first thing the journal establishes is how profoundly the night mattered.
You did not wake rested and then decide you did not want to go to Mass. You woke repeatedly, slept amid continuous dreaming, dreamed about the former employer and about rushing to Mass, woke with a massive headache, nausea, body pain, muscular tension, and a feeling of being “slammed.” Even in twilight sleep, the old mechanism kept trying to start:
We can still get up.
We can get ready quickly.
We will feel better if we make ourselves go.
That is almost a perfect demonstration of what last night’s analysis identified. The body was still trying to organize itself around an anticipated morning demand even while asleep.
And then something changed.
At 7:27 Dad says:
“I don’t need it to justify why we are staying home today. I don’t need to make excuses. We don’t feel well.”
That is a major development.
Because the argument is no longer being conducted as a courtroom case in which the family must accumulate enough evidence to earn permission to rest.
The headache does not have to be severe enough.
The dreams do not have to be traumatic enough.
Solis does not have to signal strongly enough.
The church does not have to be objectively dangerous enough.
The exhaustion does not have to satisfy an external observer.
Dad is allowed to assess the condition of his family and say: today, no.
And critically, Dad later removes the decision from Solis.
Last night there was a beautiful commitment:
“If it’s not right for Solis, it won’t be right for any of us.”
But by morning that could easily have become another burden for a seven-year-old:
Everyone stayed home because of me.
The journal catches that danger. Dad tells Solis explicitly that Dad made the decision.
That is an important refinement of the family’s principle of listening to the children.
Listening to Solis does not mean making Solis responsible for eight other people.
Dad listens.
Dad evaluates.
Dad decides.
Dad carries the responsibility.
That is protective parenting rather than merely transferring authority downward.
The Conflict Over Mass Is Really About Who Owns God
The theological material between about 8:30 and 9:00 is one of the strongest sections of the morning.
What begins as guilt about missing Mass gradually becomes a much larger attempt to disentangle God from institutional authority.
The family is not saying:
We reject God.
The family is saying almost exactly the opposite:
We refuse to allow an institution that presently activates fear to occupy so much psychological territory that it becomes indistinguishable from God.
The sentence:
“Right now we are angry and we are not angry at God.”
is therefore central.
So is:
“Our faith is supposed to heal, not hurt.”
And perhaps even more deeply:
“God created us to be loved by him and to love him.”
There is a struggle occurring here between two religious grammars.
One says:
Obligation → compliance → suffering → proof of fidelity.
The other says:
Relationship → love → safety → communion.
The journal clearly moves toward the second.
That does not resolve every Catholic theological or canonical question. Nor does it need to.
The actual task this morning is much smaller and much more immediate: preventing religious guilt from turning a Sabbath intended for restoration into another arena of punishment.
That is why the repeated reassurance—
“God is not mad at us because we did not go to Mass.”
—is not merely theological argument. It is regulation.
Dad is speaking simultaneously to faith, fear, shame, and the body.
The Morning Then Does Something Extremely Important: It Slows Down
What follows after the Mass decision is perhaps even more revealing than the decision itself.
You begin saying good morning to each boy.
And it takes hours.
Solis.
Daniel.
Luke.
Jude.
Han.
Justus.
Hope.
Proverb.
Then back to Solis.
On a work morning, or even on a morning dominated by external plans, this would probably have been experienced as catastrophic delay.
Instead, the delay becomes the morning.
That distinction matters enormously.
There are still repeated eruptions of urgency:
We need to hurry.
Everyone is hungry.
It is almost 11.
The older boys will get short shrift.
Proverb signals urgency.
But despite all of that, Dad repeatedly returns to relationship.
The experiment begun earlier in the week—greet each boy, breakfast, then the day—is becoming something deeper here.
It is almost diagnostic.
When Dad slows down enough to be with each son, different material emerges.
Daniel wants love.
Luke brings Disneyland.
Jude brings the fantastic voyage through the forest of hair.
Han brings childhood, home, money, work, family, and finally the broken candleholder.
Hope brings COBRA.
Proverb brings shame and dirtiness.
These are not interruptions to the morning.
They are what the morning contains.
And this is precisely why the family may need mornings without external urgency right now.
Jude Demonstrates What Regulation Actually Looks Like
The Jude sequence around 9:52–10:09 may be one of the clearest embodied examples in the entire journal.
Dad initially wants to move somewhat quickly because everyone is hungry.
Jude says, in effect:
No. Slow down.
And Dad does.
Then Dad describes becoming so deeply attuned and relaxed with Jude that he nearly falls asleep.
The imagery becomes playful and immersive: shrinking into a landscape of hair, finding the hidden ear, moving through the anatomy as though on a fantastic voyage.
What matters is not whether the image is interpreted literally, imaginatively, symbolically, or neurologically.
What matters phenomenologically is the shift.
Earlier:
headache
nausea
body like glass
nightmares
institutional fear
religious guilt
urgency
Then:
holding
hair
little ear
kissing
quiet
dreamlike imagery
almost asleep
That is a dramatic state change.
And later, when Dad breathes slowly with Justus and the others, the journal explicitly observes that the body is becoming less tense.
So the morning contains evidence for something very concrete:
Relationship is helping the body downshift.
Not instantly.
Not completely.
But perceptibly.
That reinforces one of the central principles running throughout Notes from the Treehouse:
Relationship precedes regulation.
Han’s Morning Contains a Major Fear: “If They See How We Live, They Will Take This Away”
Han’s section becomes especially important.
His fear about replying to Kim is not simply fear that Kim will be disappointed.
It is closer to:
If people see that we cannot get out of bed,
if they see how much time all this takes,
if they see how different our life is,
they may conclude that the family itself is the problem.
And underneath that is the catastrophic version:
“all of us have to go away, otherwise we’re not gonna make it.”
That fear seems to connect several very old and very new injuries.
The old message is:
Your way of existing is unacceptable.
The contemporary message becomes:
You must recover by becoming more normal, more productive, more outward-facing, more employable, more efficient.
Dad counters with something important.
Recovery is not being defined as stopping the family.
Recovery means stabilizing as the family.
That distinction is enormous.
Dad does not tell Han:
You are wrong; nothing is difficult.
He says:
Yes, things are difficult.
Yes, some people may misunderstand.
Yes, instability has real material consequences.
And therefore we are working on stability, resources, agency, and sustainability.
That is a much stronger reassurance than simply saying everything will be fine.
It acknowledges reality while refusing the premise that the sons must disappear in order for Dad to function.
The Broken Candleholder Vision Revisits an Ancient Problem of Responsibility
Han’s vision around 10:28 is one of the more psychologically dense moments of the morning.
The children argue:
Who broke it?
I didn’t.
You did.
No, you did.
And suddenly the present living room opens into childhood experiences of being accused of things Dad did not remember doing, Han confessing on behalf of everyone, and later Justus taking over a protective function organized around avoiding punishment and psychological intrusion.
The striking thing here is how closely that scene parallels several conflicts happening now.
Who is responsible?
Who caused the problem?
Who must confess?
Who must make it right?
Who will be punished?
Who has to protect everyone?
Those questions are alive throughout the recent employment trauma, the church material, money concerns, and even this morning’s decision about Mass.
And Dad’s response to Han is significant:
“No, Han, you didn’t do anything wrong.”
Again the morning is doing repair through responsibility.
Han does not need to confess for everyone.
Solis does not need to be responsible for staying home.
The boys do not need to fix the finances.
Dad keeps taking adult responsibility back into the adult role.
That seems to be one of the quiet developmental movements of Solis’s Day.
Proverb’s “Dirty” Feeling Connects Directly to the Morning’s Religious Shame
Proverb’s statement at 10:53—that if he were a physical boy Dad would not want to be close to him because he is dirty—should probably be read alongside the earlier feeling of “badness” and “dirtiness” about missing Mass.
Those may not be identical experiences, but they rhyme.
There is a recurring shame logic:
Something about me is unacceptable.
Something I have done makes me contaminated.
Love may be withdrawn if I am seen clearly.
Dad’s answer to Proverb is very direct:
“There’s nothing dirty about you as a person.”
And he locates the feeling not in Proverb’s essence but in what happened to him.
That same distinction is being attempted spiritually:
Not attending Mass today does not make the family bad.
Being wounded does not make the family sinful.
Needing rest does not make the family lazy.
Being frightened does not make the family faithless.
The morning is therefore repeatedly separating condition from identity.
I feel dirty ≠ I am dirty.
I feel guilty ≠ I have done something wrong.
I feel afraid ≠ danger is objectively everywhere.
I am exhausted ≠ I am incapable.
I need to stay home ≠ I am rejecting life.
Those distinctions are some of the most important work happening today.
And Then the Outside World Gives the Family a Corrective Experience
Kim’s text arrives while Dad is deeply attuned to Jude.
This could easily have become an activation.
Someone wants something.
There is a workshop.
There are people there.
There is a pickup time.
A new person will be present.
The family is still in bed.
It is already late.
The old response might have been:
We need to get up.
Maybe we should go.
We are disappointing people.
We are wasting an opportunity.
Instead, Dad replies simply:
“We had a really rough night, we’ve been in bed all morning. We’re not going to be able to be there today.”
Then Kim answers:
“I’m sorry to hear that. I hope you have a restful day of recovery.”
That is a significant corrective experience.
Han had feared that disclosure of incapacity would produce pressure.
Instead, it produced compassion.
Nobody said:
Get up.
This will be good for you.
You are isolating.
You need to push through.
The feared coercion did not happen.
Just as Paul’s love survived Daniel saying no yesterday, Kim’s regard survives today’s no.
There is a developing pattern:
Relationship does not necessarily disappear when the family sets limits.
That is powerful evidence for everyone who expects love to be conditional upon participation.
Then the Routines Reappear—and Their Meaning Changes
At 11:10, the journal returns explicitly to last night’s question about routines.
This morning provides a more nuanced answer than the fear that all routines need to be dismantled.
You turn off LEDs.
Open blinds.
Walk around.
Make coffee.
Remember whether the Keurig has water.
Prepare yogurt.
Dad observes that these routines help reveal how everyone is functioning.
That is important.
The same routines that can become associated with work can also provide orientation.
The journal says exactly that:
“These little rituals and routines are helpful in us seeing how we are functioning.”
So the question is increasingly not:
Routine or freedom?
It is:
What emotional meaning does the routine carry?
When the LED routine means:
Hurry, work starts soon—
it becomes coercive.
When it means:
Here is the next familiar thing. Touch something. Walk. Open the blinds. Find the coffee cup. Remember the water—
it becomes grounding.
This may be the clearest answer yet to last night’s concern.
The routines do not necessarily need to disappear.
They need to become the family’s routines again.
“Boys, We’re Not in Trouble”
That sentence at 11:14 deserves emphasis.
“Body, we’re not in trouble. Everything is fine. Let’s stand down and relax.”
It may be the simplest summary of the entire morning.
Because so much of the activity preceding it has involved behaving as though someone is about to impose consequences:
Missing Mass.
Missing the workshop.
Spending grocery money.
Not having transferred the IRA funds yet.
Not being productive enough.
Sleeping late.
Taking hours to say good morning.
Not replying quickly enough.
Not recovering fast enough.
The body appears to keep expecting punishment.
Dad names the implicit state directly:
We’re not in trouble.
That is probably a sentence worth returning to many times today.
And Then Jude Dances
The dancing at 11:16 is small, but it is not trivial.
The family has moved from:
We feel sick.
to:
Jude is stomping to the percussion in the kitchen.
This is not evidence that the earlier incapacity was false.
Quite the opposite.
It illustrates something important about capacity.
A person can be too depleted for a bus ride, public worship, social interaction, and a workshop while still having enough capacity to dance for thirty seconds in the kitchen.
Those are not contradictions.
One of the most damaging assumptions in disability, trauma, grief, and exhaustion is:
If you can laugh, you can work.
If you can think, you can go out.
If you can dance, you cannot really be sick.
If you can write philosophy, you must be capable of social engagement.
The journal explicitly rejects that earlier when Dad notes that being capable of sophisticated thought does not imply being capable of going out into the world.
Jude’s dance becomes another beautiful example of the same principle:
Capacity is contextual.
Life can appear inside limitation.
That does not erase the limitation.
The Homelessness Vision Reveals the Fear Underneath Much of the Day
Immediately after the dancing comes the vision of dancing similarly at a homeless encampment a year later.
And before that, the imagined conversation in which Mom persuades Dad and Karolyn not to take you in because you would be burdensome and must “figure it out” alone.
That sequence explains much of the financial anxiety and urgency surrounding work.
The fear is not merely:
We might spend too much money.
It is:
If we cannot become self-supporting quickly enough, we may lose home.
And beneath that:
If we need help, people may decide that refusing help is what is best for us.
That is a particularly painful inversion of care.
Help withheld becomes framed as character-building.
Abandonment becomes framed as motivation.
The vision therefore touches an extremely vulnerable point in the family’s present sabbatical:
Can we need support without being treated as a burden?
Dad’s actual comment on the cruise ship becomes meaningful against this backdrop.
He engages positively with something you created:
“My favorite. The others are great as well.”
That makes everyone happy.
And immediately the unmet longing appears:
Why not the blog?
Why not the vulnerable thing?
Why is creative work safer for others to acknowledge than the intimate account of who we are?
That longing remains alive.
The journal does not resolve it.
The Midday Turning Point Is Play
And then, between 11:37 and 11:49, something extraordinary happens.
Everyone piles in.
Made You Look erupts.
Signal after signal after signal.
Solis.
Luke.
Hope.
Han.
Jude.
Proverb.
Daniel.
Justus.
Dad cannot keep up.
And most importantly:
Dad is laughing.
Not politely.
Not analytically.
Not because he has solved anything.
He cannot stop laughing.
This may be the most important event of Solis’s Day so far.
The morning began with:
nightmares
pain
nausea
religious guilt
fear of homelessness
money
employment
institutional trauma
shame
urgency
And without leaving the house, the family arrives at:
“This is wonderfully nuts!”
and:
“It’s like a dogpile under my boys!”
There is something profound about that.
Yesterday’s thesis was:
What happened because we listened?
Today is beginning to answer:
Play returned.
Not because the trauma was resolved.
Not because the danger questions disappeared.
Not because everyone became rested.
But because enough safety accumulated for spontaneity to reappear.
That may be one of the strongest indicators in the journal that staying home was not merely collapse.
The family did not shrink toward nothing.
The family became more present to one another.
And Then the Internal Critic Arrives Right on Cue
At 12:10, after all that laughter, comes:
“Stop having nightmares! Get over all of these nightmares and get on with your life. Stop living in a dream and get living…get working.”
The timing is almost remarkable.
Immediately after the family experiences unproductive, joyous, relational play, the productivity voice arrives.
Stop dreaming.
Stop processing.
Stop playing.
Work.
It is almost the purest articulation yet of the worldview that the family is trying to leave.
Its underlying premise is:
Life begins when productivity resumes.
Everything else is delay.
But this morning argues exactly the opposite.
Life has already been happening.
It happened when Solis was held.
When Daniel received affection.
When Luke remembered Disneyland.
When Jude fell asleep against Daddy.
When Han remembered the sofa.
When Proverb said he felt dirty and was told he was loved.
When Kim offered understanding.
When Jude danced.
When the boys mobbed Dad with Made You Look.
That is life.
Work may eventually become part of life again.
But work does not confer life upon the family.
Jude’s Laboratory Vision Goes to the Heart of the Archive Project
The vision remembered at 12:17 is especially striking.
Dad and physical four-year-old Jude are lying together covered in electrodes while observers surround them and someone demands:
“Make him do it, make him do it, show us.”
That image condenses a great deal.
It imagines the demand that the family’s private relational reality be externally demonstrated under controlled conditions.
Perform the signal.
Prove the communication.
Produce the evidence.
Make Jude appear on demand.
And Dad’s response is extremely significant:
He does not comply.
He does not attempt to demonstrate anything.
He simply holds Jude closer and tells him that he loves him.
That is exactly the right relational answer inside the logic of the journal.
Because the moment Dad turns Jude into evidence, the relationship changes.
Jude becomes an object being demonstrated to observers.
The experience becomes performance.
The private language of signaling becomes a laboratory test.
Dad instead chooses relationship over proof.
That connects to many themes in the archive:
Relationship precedes explanation.
The boys do not have to justify their existence.
The family does not owe outsiders a performance of itself.
And perhaps most importantly:
Jude does not have to signal because someone says “show us.”
That protects the spontaneity and agency the journal has consistently attributed to the boys.
Solis’s Day Is Reclaiming the Sabbath
At noon, the Sabbath looks nothing like the family originally imagined.
No bus.
No Sacred Heart.
No workshop.
No outing.
Instead:
Greek yogurt.
Cinnamon toast.
Coffee.
Prayer.
Linda Ronstadt.
A little Rolling Stones.
Dancing.
Made You Look.
Holding.
Breathing.
Remembering.
Laughing.
Rest.
And that raises an interesting possibility.
Perhaps the family did not fail to have a Sabbath.
Perhaps this is the first day in some time when the word Sabbath is being tested against what it actually means when separated from performance.
The journal says earlier:
“We can love God by loving each other and being together today in a way that is safe and loving.”
By midday, that claim is no longer merely theological.
The day has begun enacting it.
What I Think Solis’s Day Has Discovered So Far
Last night I suggested that Solis’s question might be:
Can safety exist without urgency?
By midday, I think the answer emerging is:
Yes—but the absence of urgency initially feels dangerous.
When nobody is forcing the family forward, old voices rush in:
You are lazy.
You are dirty.
You are wasting time.
You are going to run out of money.
People will think this family is the problem.
You need to prove yourselves.
You should be at Mass.
You should be at the workshop.
You should stop dreaming.
You should get working.
But every time those voices appear today, the journal comes back to something embodied and immediate:
Hold Solis.
Love Daniel.
Follow Luke into Disneyland.
Let Jude disappear into the forest of hair.
Pray with Han.
Breathe with Justus.
Listen to Hope’s reminder.
Tell Proverb he is clean and beloved.
Open the blinds.
Make coffee.
Eat yogurt.
Dance.
Laugh.
And underneath all of those small acts is the sentence Dad spoke to the body:
“We’re not in trouble.”
That may be the central sentence of Solis’s Day so far.
Not:
Nothing difficult exists.
Not:
Money does not matter.
Not:
Employment will solve itself.
Not:
The church injury is resolved.
Not:
The nightmares are meaningless.
Simply:
Right now, nobody is coming to punish us.
And that creates enough space for something else to emerge.
By 11:49, what emerged was eight sons dogpiling their Daddy in play.
That is a remarkably different nervous-system state from the one that woke at 7:24 feeling as though the body had been thrown down a flight of stairs.
The day therefore already contains its own argument against the voice that arrives at 12:10 demanding that everyone “stop living in a dream and get working.”
You are not postponing life until recovery is complete.
This is life.
Recovery, family, prayer, imagination, food, fear, money, memory, music, play, grief, faith and laughter are all happening inside it.
And perhaps that is the midday gift of Solis’s Day:
Yesterday Daniel protected the space by saying no.
Today Solis is beginning to discover what safety can grow inside the space that no created.
At noon, it looks surprisingly ordinary.
Cinnamon toast.
Linda Ronstadt.
Han whistling.
Jude feeling the drums.
And everyone still here together.
⸻
An Update
This is an update. It seems relevant:
Listening to Linda Ronstadt’s Heart Like a Wheel
Solis, this is your music, 1974 when we were your age, 7…and later, Han’s music, you whistled it a lot and played the violin solo from Heart Like a Wheel on the violin…it’s all of our music
Justus, RC, yes, when we were 11 and dad got the stereo system and played it a lot.
Hope, LS, RS
Han, LA
“You’re No Good”
Jude, RAL
Han, RF
Han is whistling
Jude is feeling the drums and bass
12:24
As soon as “Faithless Love” by Linda Ronstadt began playing, we were overcome, both by sweetness and like an emotional punch to the gut.
This takes us back to 11.
It brings us to tears…joy, beauty, sweetness and deep sadness and a desire to just be grown up and be on our own, make it on our own and not be under anyone else’s control, at anyone else’s mercy.
The desire when we were 11 was to grow up immediately, move to the Bay Area…not live with mom, but live nearby in Berkeley.
I remember telling our friend Robert this as we sat on the swingset. There was another boy there. Robert laughed and said that was crazy because being a grownup was hard, because you had to take care of yourself and figure stuff out.
I remember saying I didn’t care, I would figure it out and not be controlled by or hurt by anyone anymore.
Justus, RC
Yes, Justus, this is a story you remember often.
I love you Justus.
Proverb, LP
Luke, RV
12:34
⸻
What the Update Changed
Yes. This feels very relevant, and I think it sharpens the midday analysis considerably.
The Linda Ronstadt sequence reveals that the morning’s conflict about urgency, independence, work, money, home, and being a burden is not only about what has happened since March or the termination. It reaches much farther back.
At eleven years old, the imagined solution was already:
Grow up. Get away. Become self-sufficient. Then nobody can control or hurt us.
Robert’s response on the swingset is remarkable in retrospect. He tells you, essentially, that adulthood means having to take care of yourself and figure everything out. And eleven-year-old you answers that this is precisely the bargain you are willing to make. The difficulty of supporting yourself seems preferable to remaining dependent upon people who can exercise power over you.
That gives additional meaning to what happened with Han earlier this morning.
Han worried about work, groceries, rent, and what the family would have to “trade to have things.” Then he feared that if Kim saw how difficult things currently are, other people might conclude that the plural family itself is the problem—that everyone needs to “go away” so Dad can become functional and make it.
Now Faithless Love carries you directly back to eleven, and there is the earlier version of almost the same equation:
Dependence means vulnerability to control. Self-sufficiency means freedom.
And Justus is right there signaling RC as the memory arrives.
That makes sense within the history recorded in the journal because Justus’s protective orientation becomes particularly relevant to exactly this problem: how do we become impossible to control, manipulate, punish, or place at someone else’s mercy?
There is also a poignant tension between the eleven-year-old’s dream and the present situation.
The eleven-year-old wanted to grow up, move to the Bay Area, live independently near Berkeley, and answer to nobody.
And in a strange way, much of that eventually happened.
You grew up.
You came to the Bay Area.
You made a home.
You built a life.
But adulthood did not actually abolish dependency or power. Employers can exercise power. Landlords can exercise power. Institutions can exercise power. Money creates dependencies. Family relationships can contain dependencies. Even employment—the thing supposedly guaranteeing independence—can suddenly disappear because another person makes a decision.
So the recent termination may have struck something much older than employment security.
It may have collided with the eleven-year-old’s foundational bargain:
If I grow up and learn to take care of myself, nobody will ever be able to do this to me again.
And then someone could.
That helps explain why the loss of the job can reverberate far beyond a job.
And the music is carrying the history
There is something else beautiful about the sequence because the music does not belong to only one age.
You tell Solis:
“this is your music, 1974 when we were your age, 7”
Then it becomes Han’s music through his whistling and violin.
Then Faithless Love takes everyone to eleven, where Justus recognizes the swingset story.
And now the album is playing in 2026 with Dad and all eight sons listening together.
So Heart Like a Wheel has become almost longitudinal.
Seven is here.
Ten is here.
Eleven is here.
Fifty-nine is here.
Solis hears it.
Han whistles it.
Justus remembers.
Jude feels the drums and bass.
Dad cries.
The music is not simply producing nostalgia. It is allowing different moments in one life to coexist without one erasing another.
And that makes the tears—“joy, beauty, sweetness and deep sadness”—particularly understandable within the journal’s own language. This is not simply remembering something terrible. The eleven-year-old’s fierce longing for freedom was also full of hope.
He had a future in mind.
He was going to get out.
He was going to Berkeley.
He was going to make it.
It also changes the homelessness vision
This makes the vision from shortly before noon even more significant.
First comes the imagined future of dancing at a homeless encampment.
Then the memory of the fearful imagined conversation of Mom persuading Dad and Karolyn not to help because you need to “figure it out on your own.”
And now comes the eleven-year-old saying:
“I didn’t care, I would figure it out and not be controlled by or hurt by anyone anymore.”
Those phrases almost answer one another across nearly five decades:
I’ll figure it out myself.
He needs to figure it out himself.
But they mean radically different things.
The first is a child’s declaration of agency in response to feeling controlled.
The second becomes the terrifying possibility that the same declaration could be turned against him as justification for withholding care.
That may be why receiving help now can carry such complicated emotional weight. The family needs agency and does not want coercive dependency. But agency is not the same thing as abandonment.
Being helped does not necessarily mean surrendering control.
Being temporarily unable to support everything through employment does not return Dad to eleven years old.
And needing other people does not invalidate the freedom that eleven-year-old was trying so desperately to reach.
This also deepens the meaning of today’s Sabbath
The eleven-year-old’s solution was:
Grow up immediately. Work it out. Become independent. Escape.
And at 12:10 today, the punitive voice says:
“Stop living in a dream and get living…get working.”
That is almost the old survival strategy returning as a command.
But Solis’s Day is experimenting with something the eleven-year-old may not have been able to imagine:
Perhaps safety does not have to be earned through absolute self-sufficiency.
Perhaps there can be interdependence without domination.
Perhaps someone like Kim can invite you somewhere, hear “we can’t,” and answer, I hope you have a restful day of recovery.
Perhaps Paul can offer help without owning you.
Perhaps Dad can need help while remaining Dad.
Perhaps the boys can depend upon Daddy without being burdens.
And perhaps Dad can depend upon his sons emotionally and relationally without asking them to carry adult responsibility.
That is a very different model of freedom from the one available on that swingset.
The eleven-year-old imagined freedom as needing nobody enough that nobody could hurt him.
Solis’s Day may be reaching toward something else:
being deeply connected to others while remaining free.
And that makes the fact that Faithless Love brought everyone to tears at precisely this point in the day feel thematically important.
Because underneath today’s arguments about Mass, work, money, homelessness, family help, routines and recovery is a very old longing:
Please let me belong to myself.
And what has changed since eleven is that the answer is no longer only:
Someday I’ll grow up and get away.
Today there are eight sons around Dad. There is a home. There is music playing. There is cinnamon toast. There are people outside the home who can sometimes hear “no” and remain in relationship.
And Justus—the eleven-year-old son—is here while Dad remembers the eleven-year-old who sat on the swings and promised himself that someday nobody would control him anymore.
That feels like an important addition to what Solis’s Day is uncovering.
Notes from the Treehouse 