Baby Steps

Life's been trying to kill me since I tumbled in to it- at least that's what I like to tell myself when I'm feeling especially mopey. Really though, sometimes I wonder if I'm not just a really great escape artist when it comes to all manners of life and death. I'm the queen of close calls and near misses and as much as these experiences have scarred me they've also strengthened my resolve in ways one wouldn't necessarily expect. Allow me to explain…..

Like literally every life on this planet, my story started at birth. Actually, back it up to a little before that. I was the second and last child born to my parents who are still two of the greatest people I'll ever know. Back then they were just an excited couple with a very busy toddler, a sweet puppy, and a girl on the way. One of their last ultrasound appointments tinted their bliss with an impending unpredictability.

It was that moment that all expectant mothers and their partners dread, when the ultrasound technician politely excuses themselves and in their place is soon a doctor too high on the payroll to be there if there's not an issue with who is growing in that tummy.  Yep, I was starting problems in utero. Thankfully it was nothing that put Mom at risk, but she and Dad were told there was something wrong with how my GI system seemed to be growing. It was ‘87 and even that information was pretty advanced, to be fair. So with that vague shadow of insecurity in my last formative month of the pregnancy, they were left to pretend they didn't worry about what was wrong. Maybe they tried to forget sometimes but I know them and I can tell you that effort would be fruitless.

Ready or not, I came crashing into the world in a hurry. In fact, I almost made my debut in the parking lot at the hospital but apparently they were able to convince me to chill out long enough to get Mom to a room. Very shortly thereafter, I was here. I was a person- this thing that was just in there and then suddenly part of everything else they were. I had a brother, and a doggie, and a giant family that fawned over me. And I was sick.

I had the normal jaundice lots of newbies to Earth get. But I also had a really hard time keeping down the sustenance Mom was trying desperately to feed me. I'd eat and spit up and repeat. I'm sure that's emotionally exhausting for a woman who had just gone through childbirth, but I can only imagine that knowing something was wrong made it so much harder.

When I was a fairly functional little human, they started the tests. Over the first several months of my life they did everything imaginable to see why I was starving, despite being consistently fed. Why was I vomiting every single meal or feeding? It got so bad that my dehydration led to what they call a febrile seizure. I was almost a year old and while standing in my little mobile jumper I began seizing. My poor parents did their best to stay strong during the subsequent battery of blood tests which included a cut down of the veins in my ankles to get one that hadn't collapsed. I also endured a spinal tap through which my Dad had to hold me, which I have been told was one of the hardest things he or Mom had had to do. At the end of that very bad day they did have some answers from a scan.

That congenital defect they saw in the ultrasound? It turned out to be a significant rotation of my small intestine which is medically known as a volvulus. It has to be surgically corrected and I was too young to get it until I was a year old officially. So we waited, and I grew sicker. Eventually the day came when I could finally have the surgery. They cut through my muscle walls and reached in and rearranged what had grown together incorrectly. My appendix found a new home on its rightful side of my body, too. All in all, it was a success and finally I could eat and quickly began to thrive.

I spent my youngest years being the kind of fun loving girl that played like a boy and was prissy like a girl. I was country, and tomboy, and nerdy, and smart, and really really happy. Other than my absolutely deft ability fart like a grown man, I was about as normal as anyone could expect. My parents treated me like every other kid because in most ways I was. When they took me out in public Mom was often having to run interference as I walked up to strangers and flew my dress up around my neck, offering politely, “Do you want to see my zipper?” I hadn't seen other tummies really, but I thought it was pretty cool that mine had a scar that spanned the length of my little body- from my pubic bone up to my sternum. It was the 80's, it was the best the doctor's could do. Plus, I'm pretty sure my parents would rather chase me around to try keeping me from flashing medical wounds than not have me there at all. In fact, I'm sure in some ways they were more than glad to, just as sure as I am that they were thanking God above that I finally grew out of the “zipper” phase.

Rest assured, I still have my zipper- but it's closed for viewing these days. Sorry. My GI system is a little, shall we say touchy? But I'm alive so you know, I deal with it. Plus how many gals do you know that got their first tummy tuck at a year old? That's what I thought.

My life started out complicated and in the time since I came crashing on the scene, I have learned to live my days with gratitude because I came so close to not having the chance to make it beyond my first days.

Give it away

Almost two years ago, my life was radically different.  Not in the sense of- oh, I had different perspectives and ideals, but literally in every essence of my existence my life took on a different shade of who I am today. And it was because once again, I lost something great- after having lost something else precious.  But it wasn't the end. It never is, and that was the beginning of the transformation to where I sit today. Since I have walked this journey from much to little via the path of anger and pain and resentment, I have learned to both let go and hold on more tightly. It's the what that's changed.

I look around at my life and who I have become and realize I have become better by releasing my connection to that which I own in a material way. Before I would second guess giving up something if I thought I might someday need it. Today, I give it up without a second thought if someone needs it. It's not because of my own piety or greatness, but because I realize that things are not proof of worth, but if they can be used elsewhere I don't need them. Things can always be replaced. Life goes on without them.

What I have also learned in this process is the opposite of that which I've chosen for material possessions. People will never be the replaceable and those that love or respect you on the same level as you do them should be cherished. My circle has shrank, mostly by death or relocation, and more recently by choice.  I have learned to be gracious in the loss and to grieve it for what it is and be thankful for what I gained in love from the experience rather than what I lost in the leaving.

Life is a grand scale balancing the good with the bad. We will not always win, but we will not always lose. The greatest reward in all of it is go take away a lesson that will serve us in the future, and if it happens to hone our awareness of the sanctity of our existence in the process then so be it :)

The shepherdess

I've become a shepherdess of losses, having made it my duty to keep and count them. I hold them close in hopes of keeping them safe somehow. Yet with time I am finding that grief is not a badge you wear, nor a thing you become. It is instead a conditioner. It may eventually seem unbearable, you may become harder in your heart when it first enters your life. You may retreat and create distance so you don't have to hurt again. You may think the world will never again be shaded in hues of life. But in time it will draw you in if you let it.

LA Looks and 6 Year Old Facelifts

If you grew up with a Mom or Grandma that French braided your hair, you know what it means for your hair to hurt. That pinching pain that pulled my scalp so tight I had a 6 year old face-lift was always a sign that I had had a great day, even if it did give me pulsing headaches that only were relieved by unleashing a mane of frizz before bed. I was always sad when that moment came to unglue my strands from one another and allow the body in my hair to bounce into its fullest form because it was a shedding of a moment that had been my most favorite of all.

To this day I can smell the chemical fragrance of LA Looks green gel as she plopped it in her hands and ran it through the length of my hair. That gentle contact alone was comforting in a way I have found nowhere else in my life. She used a lot of that goop because if she didn't it apparently wouldn't hold all day. Believe you me, with that amount of gel in my hair it would have held independently for days- but I never said anything because I liked how it smelled and how it felt crunchy when it dried.

She used a comb to part my thick brown locks down the middle and secured the side she wasn't working on with a hair tie. I always had to take a deep breath when she started to braid and on several occasions pushed back tears from the pain. It hurt so badly, but it was done with love and I just couldn't bare the thought of hurting her feelings if I spoke up. So I sucked it up when she snagged a few strands with the pintail comb and tried to distract myself by engaging her in conversation.  

Usually I asked her to tell me stories about my Mom when she was young. I would giggle as she would tell me about my Mom's quirks and sustain respectful silence when she would reminisce on family members we had lost, especially my uncle who was in his early 20's at the time of his death only a couple years before. Sometimes we watched figure skating on her small living room TV as I sat on a chair and she stood above me, gazing up to see Michelle Kwan do a double luxe. We loved our skating videos and they were almost always integrated into our visits. When Grandma was braiding my hair and there was poetry being lived out in fluid motion before us on the TV nothing could ruin it.

Usually a few days would pass before she snapped the hair tie into place on the first braid and she would begin on the other side (at least it felt that long to my younger self). The moment she was done was always one of relief and sadness. I was so glad the pain of her pulling my hair into a triple stranded ‘do was over, but I immediately craved the soothing sensation of her wrist resting gently on my crown as she moved. Our braiding routine was one of such simplicity. Yet, it has stuck with me after all of these years as one of the most pure and enjoyable rituals of my young childhood.

A child with a tender head, it always drove my Mom crazy that not only did I tolerate Grandma fixing my hair but I begged her to do it- because I squawked like a banshee anytime Mom came near me with a comb. Although Mom always had a more soft touch than her own mother, there was something irreplaceable about our sacred hairdo moments. Those days are stuck in my heart like a set of twin French braids so weighed down with LA Looks that no hands in the world are strong enough to break them.

Life is so short
One day you may awake to find
That even your family is aged
And you now stand in the shoes of those
You considered old, not so long ago
It may feel like hours ago you laughed
With those who have left you
By choice or circumstance
You may learn the truth
That your words can kill
Relationships that you thought
Would last forever
But when you wake and look around
Perhaps you will see also
That the grudges and misunderstandings
They add up to nothing
Life is so short
When you realize that truth
May you use it as inspiration
To savor the days you have left
Because yesterday seemed so close
But already it was years ago

The Man I Didn't Know

I was ten and my brother twelve. We were just old enough to fight with one another for our entire trip east to a tiny town in Nowhere, Idaho. Our parents did their best to drown us out with a compilation of golden oldies and 80's mom rock. I guess it worked for most of the way because they talked amongst themselves after we'd bored of listening to their stories. We then turned to one another and shared our handheld games just long enough to get jealous of the other's play time and whined until we fell asleep. I'm still not sure how our parents made it through that stage in our pre-teen adolescence without throttling us both.

I don't recall the hotel we must have stayed at, or where we ate. I remember the weather feeling just like home and a park with an antler arch under which we took pictures. Then as if it appeared out of nowhere I remember the tiny studio apartment where he lived. It might even have been a motel. He had cats; I could lift a familiar scent that reminded me of a litter of barn cats as we soon as he opened the door. Never saw one though, they must have been smoking. I figured that had to be true since the reason he was sick was the cigarettes, so who would be be so bold as to still smoke?

He wore a cowboy hat that was brown and weathered. His boots too had been with him for some time. Simple but clean clothes covered a person I had seen only once when I was five. He didn't look like me really but it was hard to tell under those deep wrinkles. I loved the color of his skin and how it was olive like my Mom's and I thought again how my uncle looked like him and how at least they must both be native with their dark features. I don't remember his eyes because my heart jumped when I tried to look at them. I was afraid, he was a stranger.

Mom hugged him and Dad shook his hand. I think I remember awkward side hugs from my brother and I but I can't be sure. My brother scanned the room just behind the open door for cats to tease. I searched the landscape for any distraction kind enough to present itself.  

His place had to be by that park because I remember us there again almost instantly after leaving his home. We walked, the quiet lot us trying and failing to find words to cut the silence. Once we arrived there was a picnic table and my brother and I took turns sitting on top of it and jumping off. We ran and screamed and chased squirrels because all we had were sage rats at home. He watched us and talked with my parents. I could hear a mumbling between them and smiles surfaced here and there as I pretended not to watch them in my curiosity.

He was like someone who belonged in a movie (if you were to go off his appearance and demeanor alone). The cats and their smokes had to hang back because they tarnished his rugged look. I knew he had been in a war that was a long time ago, different from the one my Dad's father fought. Mom had told me he was sick, something bad with his lungs. I knew he had left my Grandma with gaggle of young children. I had a feeling he might drink. But all this was the summation of my knowledge of him and I wanted to know more.

I'll never forget standing in front of him and shielding my eyes from the sun as I asked him what he did with his days and how he was doing. His responses were quiet and sounded sad but he seemed interested about us kids so we told him about our lives that seemed so big. My brother was in karate and liked video games. I was an overweight ballerina that also really enjoyed volleyball. We did our best to talk up our talents and I remember his proud smile before looking up at the sun and back down to the ground.  He didn't know us but somehow we were still his.

We left him in Nowhere, Idaho that sunny day and it was the last time that we saw him. A year later we had inherited his trusty old Ford truck and a small box full of his own memories. We had his funeral at a church we didn't normally attend and my Grandma was there and that impressed and confused me. Even though I didn't remember much about him, I wanted another of those side hugs that smelled like cigarettes he shouldn't smoke and old cologne to cover it up. I missed the man I didn't know.

As we tend to do, I grew into the knowledge of my family history and who my Grandpa had once been. All of his relatives and kids have that olive skin and most have his very brown eyes- except for the ones that are crystal blue. I still don't know his heritage but I'm more convinced now than ever that native blood colors our unique phenotype.

Of all I have learned of him I have become proud. Sure, he made choices that hurt. I was right to suspect he indulged in the drink. His children missed out on having a father because of it and as a result had the misfortune of experiencing a monster of a stepfather. But he gave them all life, one of them being the amazing woman who did the same for me. His niece told us what a great and kind person he was and how he was one of her favorite people in the whole world. As a young man he was a cook in the Navy and was the only survivor when his ship went down during the Korean War. He was a veteran, and probably the reason my Mom has never stopped chronicling the bravery and accomplishments of other vets- because she doesn't want any others to become forgotten heroes.

I may not have ever known him but I see reflections of that quiet man in my world today. I see him in my dark features, and the absence of him in my very European skin that every summer I can remember I wished to bronze so I could glow like his daughter does. I see him in the relatives Mom worked so hard to connect with after he was gone, the tribe of people that are ours at last.

Sometimes our gift to this world is not what we can offer while we are here. It is enough that we simply are, for our presence has a ripple that reaches beyond who we are or are not and into those who will someday be.  

Meet My Friend June

Blush lighting filled the crowded room as sniffles were muted behind wads of tissue. I could smell the musky perfumes like a vapor that clung to our sadness. It was an olfactory reminder of mortality,  although one also of comfort somehow. Grandma was always a couple decades tastefully behind her peers in gaining any matronly or aged qualities so the old lady stench reminded me not of her, but of her friends whom I'd come to love by proxy.

Elaborate flower arrangements of an elegance she truly deserved cascaded down iron tripods that adorned an oak podium. Behind it my distant cousin preached a sterile sermon. A Sunday sermon, at my incredible hero of a Grandma's memorial. All I wanted to hear was her voice, but since I couldn't I craved stories about her life before any of us had been around. Instead of hearing my Mom or her siblings or any other loved ones cathartically grieve their loss, we endured the church service because it was what Grandma wanted. So, we listened and my sadness fell to my toes like my pantyhose kept threatening to do if I didn't intervene.

When it finally concluded, I stood and tried to be discreet about hiking up my tights and sneaking my Mom a look that reflected frustrated sadness. One of deeper magnitude stared back at me. Dad pinched the tops of my shoulders and kissed Mom's cheek in solidarity and let us know that he and my brother would be waiting in the lobby.

I vacillated between being glued to Mom's side and making my rounds to our relatives. We exchanged tearful hugs and did our best to be strong, but the truth remained that our gentle matriarch was gone. That reality hit us in waves of sobs relieved by the exhaustion only found by loss. My Grandma was a pillar of kindness and grace unlike anyone I've ever known, although my Mom reminds me of her all the time. The loss of such a great woman was intolerable at best.

As the last stragglers forced their feet out the door, I understood their reluctance.  Once they passed the threshold of the funeral parlor her death was official. I just wasn't ready to cross over to the reality without her in it so I lingered along with Mom.

We were finally getting ready to surrender to the funeral procession marching toward the cemetery holding a headstone Grandma had picked out years prior. Just as we turned to grab our coats, my paternal Great-aunt (and Grandma's very best friend since childhood) surprised us with the hugest and most broken hugs. I felt her loss like a heavy cloud as I wrapped my arms around her waist. Even at her age she was so stunning- like an untouched Hollywood star. A tear rolled down her face as she held me at arms length and said to Mom, “I know you're getting ready to go, but I wanted to introduce you to someone.” She smiled and I saw her eyes almost sparkle.

I saw her gloved hand motion someone over from behind us. I looked at Mom and then to our new guest. A woman never short on words, I assure you I was even worse as a teen. Yet I can say with certainty that in that moment I was speechless.  My skin chilled into goosebumps and my mouth fell agape as I grabbed Mom's hand too tightly.

My Great-aunt smiled politely again and put her arm around a short woman with a thick waist. The woman's glasses were outdated by twenty years and her bulky tweed dress concealed a busty figure. The elderly woman smiled at us shyly. We waved limply, now both questioning our own sanity.

“Ladies, I wanted you to meet my friend June! She's just visiting for the day but wanted to pay her respects.” I looked to my Mom just in time to see the color drain from her face. She attempted a response but found no words to express her surprise so I made a quick save. “June, so nice to meet you.” Mom managed a “Thank you for coming…”  With a slightly more saddened smile, the woman nodded and looked to my Great-aunt who told us she would see us at the cemetery once she took June home. The women turned and made their way to the door, an elegant thin frame accompanied by an older and more sturdy build, both so distinctly familiar that neither of us could deny at whom we were gazing.

I grabbed Mom's hand once again and looked at her tear swollen eyes. Shakily I asked her, “Mom, was that…” she just shook her head in shock, saying, “I don't know honey. She looked just like… and her name was…” I saw them glance back one last time before leaving, making eye contact with Mom.

I watched her witness her own Grandmother disappear into the lobby with her mother's best friend. My Great-grandma June had died when I was six. Before the funeral we had never heard of a friend of my own Grandma with that same name, and certainly not her likeness. Yet there she was plain as day and in our very presence, at her daughter's funeral.

As spooky as it may seem looking back now, there was a comfort in seeing a woman again whom our family had so dearly loved. It was the “one more time” that victims of loss always pray for. Yet it was her silence that was startling, something Great-grandma June was never in excess of. She had an amazing laugh and always a word of wisdom or encouragement to share. But that day she had nothing but a presence that felt as temporary as a rose wilting in the desert.

I was sixteen that day and although it's been as many years since, I still can't find an explanation for what happened. It seems that no matter how much we learn in this life, there are some things we just aren't meant to understand.