About that wall...

Photo by MabelAmber on Pixabay

Since November 2016, there has been an awful lot of big talk about walls. Got to protect ourselves, right? There are a lot of bad hombres out there, after all.

Here's the thing. I get it.

Keep reading, please. I'm still the same center-left tree-hugger – or far-left liberal nutjob, depending on your lens – that I've been far longer than most of you have known me.

Still. I know a thing or two about walls. And I bet if I pushed hard enough, you'd admit that you do too.

Think about it. Walls aren't all bad. It's March 8 in the South and I'm sitting here watching it snow. I'm pretty dang grateful to have a set of sturdy walls between me and all of that.

Or take my cats. True, they are not fans of walls unless said walls can be climbed. But walls sure come in handy when they won't stop fighting and need to be confined to separate corners!

It's not really snow or cats that are leading me down this thought-path, however. I'm thinking more of the times walls don't work.

Like border walls.

Like school walls.

Photo by Oladimejj Odunsi on Unsplash 

Like the walls we build around our personal space, both physical and emotional.

I don't know about you, but I've got a few too many of those walls. I'm talking several layers thick, like some kind of medieval fortress for my soul. It's a wall made of a lot of different materials – the election, yes, school violence, yes, but so much more. Things like the disaster that was my marriage. Learning that "innocent until proven guilty" is just a pretty phrase unless you have the right combination of color, cash, and connections. The lonely exhaustion of solo parenting, knowing I can never come close to being everything my kids deserve. The dozens of betrayals, large and small, the relationships cherished and lost, the fear of being hurt again. None of these building blocks are necessarily all that effective on their own, but stacked together, they're pretty hard to breach. If you add that I'm a natural introvert, perfectly content to be left to my own devices, well, if I'm not careful my self-made fortress can suit me awfully well.

Photo by Angello Lopez on Unsplash 

The thing is, even introverts are not made to live alone. A house built for one is not necessarily much of a home. I know this, and so I'm trying. Through heartbreak, trial, and error, I think I've found my tribe, the ones who are still and always there when the dust clears after life's many storms. Even when I wall myself in for self-protection, once I start tearing that structure down, I find them there on the other side, patiently waiting for me to emerge.

I've not yet been able to quit my wall habit. Maybe I never will. But I am happy to report that I am losing my touch. The walls aren't as thick as they used to be, and it takes less to knock them down. It's a work-in-progress, though. I still have a mean perfectionist streak that would love to stack every block so perfectly that nothing can get in.

If 40+ years on the planet have taught me anything, though, it's that perfectionism is overrated. Life is fuller, richer, better in the gaps, the places where you leave a way out... and in.

Photo by MissEJB on Pixabay

The other woman at the table

The first time they sat down together was not a happy one. Yes, they were seated at the sturdy old table that had made its way from her grandparents' kitchen to her own, the table that knew generations of joy and love. Of course it had seen its fair share of tears and hurts as well, and on that chilly afternoon, it had to absorb a whole lot more. This was not, I repeat, a happy occasion.

Maybe if she'd been less frightened, she would have been able to see the other woman clearly. But she was frightened, the kind of fear that feels like certain soul death. In that state, how was she supposed to see anything other than another one of them, the ones who seemed bent on destroying families? Talk about intolerable pain. Talk about an enemy.

Nearly a decade later, the two women sat down again, this time at the other woman's table. It was a frigid day, colder even than the first, but this time warmed, both by plates of hot lasagna and the spark of recognition that ignites when two people truly meet. Their words traveled from their childhoods to France, then on into the mountains, raising children and building houses along the way. Both could pass on Coke, but coffee? They'd rather die than live without it, just as long as it's black. They're both daddy's girls who find themselves alternately amused, chagrined, and flattered that they now sound exactly like their moms. Their grandmothers were the best bakers in the world, and both women have spent hours days trying to recreate those treats. Each has been forced to lead when she'd rather be hiding backstage, and life has dealt them both hands that sometimes, honestly, they'd rather not have to play. Yet here they are, playing those hands anyway, because, well, that's just what they do.

What changed, you ask? Simply this: one moved beyond her fear and learned to play with, not against, the other.

Searching for a starfish

You probably know some version of Loren Eiseley's story, the one where a child is throwing starfish into the ocean one by one, only to have an adult chide him for wasting his time. After all, he will never save them all, right? The child, however, has the last word, that his efforts do matter to each starfish he saves. 

It's a good story, albeit beaten to death by motivational speakers slightly overused, and it's not a bad response to November 2016, a month I generally think of as follows:

I am not just talking about THAT day. I might have been able to withstand that. Doubtful, sure, but it's what I'd like to believe. 

No, my fracture came a few days later when Vesbo, subject of Why are they always orange?, crossed the Rainbow Bridge. "I just really needed to save him," I sobbed on the phone to my parents. "And I failed."

Eventually, I cried (most) of the tears I had to cry. In their place, nothing. Yes, I had my friends, my family, my students, and they all held me together more than they will ever know. But deep down inside? That's where that big dark space was born.

Then I opened yesterday’s mail. One of the envelopes, larger than the others, bore the return address Open Arms India. I eagerly opened it, and there I saw her. Our sponsored child, holding a picture of… I looked closer…us. There we were, my family grasped in the hands of a child with a phenomenal smile. 

Something in me started to spark, a piece of my inner power grid coming back on line. I looked at that smile and thought maybe, just maybe, we were playing some small part in making that light shine. For the first time in weeks, I felt something like belief. 

I don't know what the future holds, and that thought scares me half to death. So does the fact that no matter what I want or what I try, I won't be able to save every cat or every child. But maybe, every once in a while, one of them will be my starfish. 

The psychology of shoulders

I've never woken up well from anesthesia. Not when I was a teenager having my knee scoped. Not when I was having that same knee reconstructed whilst in grad school. And not when I had a tendon in my right shoulder repaired. So when, on the afternoon of June 23, I woke to the vague sensation that my left arm had been strapped to my body, followed by the far less vague sensation of nausea, I did what any sensible person would. I went back to sleep.

Who knows how much time passed before I woke again. This time the evidence was clear. I was still nauseous, and my arm was most definitely strapped to my body. The nurse, who needed me awake to send me home, caught my eye. I decided to ask the obvious question.

"You had a rotator cuff repair, honey." 

Far too out of sorts to object to being called "honey" (for once...), I asked to see my doctor. I had come in for a simple tendon release, the kind of procedure that barely makes a blip on the radar. The surgeon, however, confirmed the nurse's statement. My rotator cuff had been completely torn.

After a week spent deliriously cycling through Percocet, broken sleep, and pain, the staples were removed and I started physical therapy.

And with it, unexpectedly, the very near loss of my mind. 

It wasn't just the pain, though there was plenty of that. It wasn't just the blinding frustration of feeling clumsy and useless. It wasn't just the realization that there was no way I could safely travel to New York one more time before school. And it wasn't even the pile of work accumulating as I sat helplessly by, my shoulder encased in ice.

It was that single, insidious, two-word question: "what if?" As in, what if it never gets better?

To make matters worse, I found myself robbed of my failsafe coping mechanisms. Writing? A leftie with her left arm in a sling can't exactly enjoy the soothing flow of ink on paper. Music? I'm a pianist, and while I've seen people perform marvels one-handed, I'm not one of them. And running? Completely off limits. 

This may sound melodramatic, but if demons are real, this is what they tell you: "your life as you know it is over." And because your demon-silencing mechanisms are out of order, you start to listen. It gets very, very dark, and no matter what you do, the "what-if" demons won't shut their foul little mouths. Before I knew it, I was down on myself for feeling down, proof if ever there was that mental states are not something people can necessarily control!

Thankfully, the mantra we try to teach children affect by trauma is true: "this too shall pass." I'm on a long road- rotator cuffs don't heal overnight, and wounded souls have an unpredictable timetable all their own- but my life once again feels like it is...literally...in my hands. 

What to do when you can't write...

When you've learned it's going to be more like 2 months than 2 weeks until your arm will be strong enough for you to face the "empty order" of the page, what is a writer to do?

Simple. 

1) Heal. 

2) Read. 

3) Share. 

Thanks to the writers and friends who are keeping me company on the road to recovery, and especially to George Ella Lyon, who gifted me...us...with these words:

There's Knowing, Then There's Knowing...

A few weeks ago, I read this article:

How Walking in Nature Changes the Brain

I totally get it. Walking, nature, they are definitely good for body and soul. When workplace drama gets me down, I lace up my running shoes and get the heck out of Dodge. When writer's block is sitting on my brain like an obese bull elephant, I grab those shoes and walk, often to a quiet place where I can just sit and quiet my mind. (The Cumberland riverbank, just above the Falls, is a particular favorite.) When my son is off the deep end and my nerves have been frayed to scorched tips? You guessed it. I lace up my Nikes and go, and go, and go.  Does this mean my problems go away? Nope. Not at all. Yet somehow, it's different. It's different because I'm different. I recognize myself again and with that kind of grounding, I can take on the world at least one more time.

Yet something about this article has been bugging me for a while, namely this. Why, in today's world, do we not believe what we know to be true until science "proves" it?  How is a brain scan more valid than the deep-seated knowledge that my time outdoors has saved my sanity more times than I can count? Don't get me wrong. I love science. It has given the world so much. Brain science in particular is making it possible as never before to help children affected by trauma. Yet science isn't everything. Sometimes you just have to listen to your soul to find all you need to know.