my little concussion

Let me tell you about my little concussion.

It was the perfect day for exploring, and I am a consummate nerd. My family was delighted to finally get our dusty feet on the trail up to the curious ash-rock cliff dwellings that make up some of the most interesting parts of Bandalier National Monument. After wending our way up a narrow picturesque staircase that led up to the caves that were hollowed out and expanded by the ancestral native peoples of long ago, we were excited to see pueblo-style ladders--an invitation to explore. The kids lost no time in climbing up into the little caves, and our littlest, Asa, was right behind them, his short, chubby two-year-old legs barely spanning the rungs, which were suspended at a 45-degree angle to the ground. It would have been a nasty fall for him, so I rushed to his aid, only to discover that he was perfectly confident and didn't need anyone's help to get up that ladder. It was a moment (ya know?), discovering that the baby of our family is suddenly able to keep up with the big dogs, and so I drew back, cell phone camera in hand, to take a picture.

It was just that one step.

The one step backwards, over ground I'd just covered and assumed I knew; the one confident step onto what was supposed to be solid ground--and it was, just not the type of solid ground I was expecting. Where flat ground was supposed to be rose a little solidified volcanic ash-heap, the funny little leftover of a long-ago explosion that no doubt rained down fire and brimstone on a very different-looking landscape. It met my foot with what I am not entirely sure was not a bit of enthusiasm, and I must have looked like Yosemite Sam slipping on a banana peel at that moment. I flew--or tried--and missed the sky by quite a bit. Instead, my head came down first, onto another pernicious little outcropping of ash-rock, with a kind of sickening BOINK. Christopher said he heard a weird mushy sound (thanks, Honey...at least we know now I'm not as hard-headed as we'd once suspected!), and he turned to find me somehow sitting up but cradling my head and saying something stupid, like, "I've never done THAT before!" My first response, after violently addling my (evidently mushy) brain was to try and act like everything was fine. How typical.

So I tried to resume the adventure, even while incubating my very own goose egg right there on the side of my skull, the labor pains of which were a dull, somewhat sickening headache. I thought I'd be okay, but then the sun began beating down on me in ernest, and the wooziness began to grow. I sort of stumbled back to the shade of the parking lot and sat drinking iced Coke and reciting the alphabet and even numbers and the pledge of allegiance in Spanish and now-is-the-time-for-all-good-men-to-come-to-the-aid-of-their-country and my kids' birthdays and my anniversary, in my head so I would know I wasn't losing cognitive ability.

As the day drew to a close, I began to notice a growing sense of uneasiness in myself. We looked up symptoms of concussion and were surprised to find out that sensory sensitivity is one of the long list of evidences of a concussion, and I was definitely experiencing that, and it was growing by the minute. I wanted the kids to shut up. I wanted to get out of the van. I wanted iced tea and tater tots NOW. I clawed my jewelry off of me because I couldn't stand the feel or the sound of it. I started crying uncontrollably and begging for a hotel room. I didn't want to go to a hospital. I was just freaking out, and my poor husband was at a loss of what to do with me. Finally my begging won out (my head was getting harder, I guess!) and we holed up for a night in Los Alamos while I relaxed and sucked down my Sonic iced tea like it was a life-saving IV. But beyond the relaxing and resting and chilling out, there was nothing that could or even needed to be done; this wound had to heal with time and with awareness.

Over the last few days, it's been getting better; I notice I start to get easily agitated, and I know that backing off and isolating myself or jamming earphones into my ears for a few minutes is enough to stave off the freakies. But that little disagreement with gravity back at Bandalier has done a couple of really useful things for me. I think it opened a door in my mind for a little while, where all of my pent-up crazy-angst of the past 2-3 weeks could finally escape. That slip on the rock, that sudden, unexpected flying into the ground, that sickening thud at the end, were all a metaphor for my emotional life lately--a metaphor I had no choice but to feel and to fully experience and to find a way through.

And what I have discovered is this: I was darned lucky that the fall wasn't worse than it was (I'm speaking in parallel here--this applies to my emotional banana slide just as much as my physical one); sitting on the ground and acting like I was fine was really assinine; I needed a strong arm (or arms, as is the case with all of my wonderful friends surrounding me with so much love and wisdom this week) to help put me back on my feet, guide me down the mountain, and force me to just stop for awhile.

I think the most important lesson here, though, is this, and it's what you've all been trying to tell me all week (I have let your words be like a soaker hose to my soul, slowly dripping in and saturating even the driest parts): this fall wasn't fatal, and it's slowly getting better. I'm still bruised and it's still a headache lurking around every stress. I'm going to be feeling the effects of this for a very long time, and honestly, my feet won't be falling so cavalier on the ground any more; I'll be a little bit jaded and a little bit careful and a little bit scared. But I know now, at least, that the adventure is still out there, in all of its danger and glory and stupidity and solemnity, and the hard landing really has toughened me up just a little, even as I've felt smaller and more fragile than at any other time of my life.

--Teri.

dreaming in coma

A week and a half ago, I began in ernest the hefty job of packing up 8 lives, deciding what was necessary to keep, what was necessary to let go of, what was necessary just to throw away. The day went quickly, and by the end of it, 6 children were declared temporarily homeless--a sacrifice each of them was happy to make because that first night spent in a sleeping bag on the living room floor heralded the advent of the biggest adventure any of us has ever been on: our grand move to the Pacific Northwest.

We were that sure.

Christopher had a wonderful interview (they all but offered him the job right then and there) 3 weeks ago with the perfect company on a beautiful island out in Puget Sound, and I had gone along to scout out housing and to get a feel for life on the island. I guess I've never been on an island before--I fell hard in love with it, and began piecing together in my mind the details of a slower-paced life, away from droves of harried people, where our schooldays would be sometimes spent tinkering with marine biology in an outdoor lab the size of our dreams. Where food and flowers grow without irrigation. Where, instead of Interstate and sirens, the only ambient noise would be the siren call of the ocean. Where we would ride the ferry to the mainland on special days and sip clam chowder on the deck while watching the orcas play in the Sound. Whidbey Island suddenly became everything we ever dreamed of, and it was all a hair's breadth away.

Monday morning--one day after we packed up most of our upstairs--Christopher was informed that he had been passed up for the job on a bizarre technicality. It wasn't lack of skill, or of a personality conflict, it was a jot and tiddle on a piece of paper that seperated us forever from that idyllic dream. We were devastated. We were shocked. We were crushed. And we were now castaways in our own home, suddenly living out of boxes and bags on the living room floor, in a house that no longer felt like ours. The shame of having "counted our chicken before it hatched" was so palpable in the house; we have never hit such a low place in the life of our family.

The ensuing days have become,instead of slowly easier in that put-one-foot-in-front-of-the-other way that keeps life trucking forward despite our worst efforts, only more difficult and bewildering. We left for an extended weekend to New Mexico, to celebrate Christopher's birthday, to see the marvel of the solar eclipse with my dear cousin and her family, and to fill up on plenty of our favorite Mexican (and New Mexican) food; but the larger reason was to put some miles between our sad home and our sad hearts, and to try and think, in a way that we can only do while the highway is rising up in a constant duet with our van tires. I truly hoped the New Mexico sun would burn up some of my many hot tears.

The long drive home last night filled me with more and more uneasiness as the miles slowly melted away to our front door. All that we had managed to escape and forget about for 4 days now loomed so thick and black just past that doorway; our children, who have been sleeping on a hard tent floor in a sleeping bag, didn't have beds to come home to--only more hard floor and the same dusty sleeping bag. There wasn't much to unpack, because what we took with us to New Mexico was mostly what we kept out for the move. But instead of arriving on the other side of the adventure into a new place, we landed back on square one, as though tethered to the prison of our empty home.

So I'm here today, completely unsure of what the next month, or two, or twelve, holds for my family. I don't know if the dream is dead, or in a coma, or will awaken any moment with a silly smile and a big appetite. But I can tell you what bothers me most. It's not the feeling of limbo (although I hate this worse than I ever thought I could); it's not the aching, crushing disappointment (though I find myself crying over this randomly). It's the knowledge that I put every ounce of faith I had into following a dream that we all thought we were being led into. I walked right into the swirling river that I've written about in the past, and for the first time, the time when the stakes were so high for my family in every imaginable way, the foothold evaporated just at the critical moment and left me naked, cold, and sputtering there, foolish in my child-like belief, moronic in my assurance that something great and exciting and solid was going to happen.

A week and a half later, I've thought of or read or heard or been told or prayed every imaginable platitude about why this happened, what lessons I'm supposed to learn, how God operates, about larger plans and wills and opportunities. I understand all of it, and I imagine there's a good bit of truth to it all.

But good God, I'm bleeding. I'm battered and soaking wet and bruised and without solace, and I can not imagine a single way forward that could erase this feeling of rejection and abandonment, save for the last 2 weeks to be completely erased. And I'll let you in on a secret: I have always been a fearful person. I've been afraid of all kinds of stuff--being unheard, being unloved, being unknown, being misunderstood. But probably my greatest existential fear--the one that wages dirty war on my belief system, the one that whispers venom in my ear when I dare to dream of bigger things, the one that twists itself around my soul when I'm trying hardest to surrender to my God--is the fear of being made a fool. Of trusting in something that turns up empty. And that is precisely what happened on Monday morning when the phone rang and the bottom dropped out of my future. And what I'm left with now is an ugly spiritual wrestling match that looks like this:

God: I know the plans I have for you.

Me: Then why won't you make them plain to me? I've asked so many times.

God: Plans to prosper you...

Me: But I'm not prospering. My family hasn't been prospering for months.

God: Not to harm you...

Me: I'm harmed. I'm so harmed. Even when you prune a branch to make it grow, there is still so much pain. Can you not see the bleeding?

God: Plans to give you hope...

Me: But I feel hopeless.

God: ...and a future....

Me: My future, my present, everything is a wreck. I don't even know how to get to my future now. My future is blocked by the mess of my present. And when I trusted you to clear the way, and make that future happen, like I really thought you said you would, it evaporated. It's gone.

God:

Me: The gaping silience is worse than the gaping wound.

I completely get that I am unfinite, trying to stare into the Infinite. I get that I cannot know the wonderful things God may have planned for me. But what if He doesn't? And what happens now that I've strained my soul to the heavens to hear for His voice whispering the way forward, and heard wrong?

--Teri.