Birthday girl, lightworker, lifesaver, the next indicated thing

Today is my girl's birthday. She is celebrating it in Paris with her love, and by the looks of it, having a grand time. I love that for her. For them. They've been sharing pictures and videos of their adventures with the fam at the end of each day, and it's been such a treat for us all. The famous attractions and citiscapes are fabulous but it's the pics of the two of them that I swoon over. Here are some of my faves.

She looks happy. And that's really all I need.

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Thank you for the kind comments in response to my low mood yesterday. I'm a lot better today, though the haircut still looks wacky. Later in the day, I realized my vapor of sadness wasn't really, truly about the hair (though it is going to be a challenge making myself show up in the world with this crazy cut). It started really with our son telling us the night before that his firehouse had been the first on the scene at LaGuardia Airport on Sunday evening after the Air Canada Express flight and the airport emergency vehicle crashed on the runway, and those two pilots died. My son and his crew were the first responders who had to cut those poor pilots out of the wreckage, and get the injured survivors to safety. It was a horrific scene, and I went to bed that night thinking about how hard some of my son's workdays are, and those pilots not making it home from their own regular workday, the fragility of our world, and then I couldn't sleep, and I got up at 3 AM and looked in the mirror, I looked so scalped and undefended,  and when I climbed back into bed, and continued to lie awake, staring into the darkness, it just started to feel like so much, too much, and that's when I started to go under. But I'm okay now. I'm a mother. Mothers rally. Parents rally. We have children in the world. And so we do what we can to get back up each day and do the next indicated thing to make this place the best it can be. For them. In this moment, on my daughter's birthday, that lightworker of a girl, and my literal lifesaver of a son, I can think of no worthier cause.

Inflatable thing

I lay in the darkness this morning and felt myself sinking under the waves, felt myself going under, had to fight my way back to the surface, trying to find breath, trying to breathe without the feeling of a thousand tiny knives. It came out of nowhere, and yet was so enticingly familiar, the sinking, the awareness of darkness closing in, the long sad weariness with myself, inviting me to relax into it, like I was an inflatable thing with a slow leak and suddenly, with no warning, I was empty of light and air. 

Mom, have you gone back to therapy after surgery yet?

No, I feel like I have nothing to talk about. 

Well, don’t wait till you’re in crisis. The real work happens when you’re not just trying to stem the bleeding. 

I reached for my phone in the dark and messaged my therapist that I was ready to start back, Mondays were still good and could I schedule an appointment. I put the phone down and concentrated on trying to breathe. 

What tipped me over? It might seem like the shallowest thing. Mere vanity even. My hair. I hadn’t had it cut since before my surgery. It grew willy nilly, curls popping out, refusing to be tucked in, except the top , which got straight and thin and wispy the longer it grew, only being tamed with curling foam that laid it down. I took the scissors to the rest, snipping off wayward coils to achieve a uniform shape, till the whole thing was wildly uneven. The woman I trust to cut and color this head full of different textures isn’t back in town till late April. I decided I couldn’t wait. I went to someone else yesterday for a repair job. It was a disaster. I’m scalped at the back and sides yet the top is still too long. She didn’t understand that the back and sides lie flat against my head when its too short and the top doesn’t curl till it’s shorter. So now I look even crazier. And I had her color it too because I was tired of the gray, but she went too dark so now I look wan and jaundiced against my patchy too dark hair with scalp peeking out all over. I look as if I just underwent a fairly aggressive round of chemo, which is to say when people see me, they're going to ask with concern, "Are you okayy??" 

It’s hard enough being inside this body on a good day. It’s harder after several weeks of poor sleep because I have to lie on my back because the hip is still healing inside, and sleeping on my back is uncomfortable as hell, my whole body aches by morning (except the hip) and I know, I know, I have no good reason to feel so low, I have so many blessings in my life, I know I do, but I get so tired of myself sometimes, I have a hard enough time showing up in the world, and this new scalped chic was just about the last straw. 

Every time I think I might stop writing here because this crazy world, I realize I’m literally insane and I need to write out my insanity and this place is therapy and don’t mind me I’m just here trying to keep on.  

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The kids are in Paris for her birthday. Here they are inside the Louvre. She’s walking fine on her braced ankle. They look like art themselves. See? Blessings. 

Every body is healing

First, the Costa Rica update: My girl was having a wonderful time, then her husband and I received this text on the day before she was to return to New York: 

What we couldn't see was that as she was texting, she was crumpled on the beach, unable to move, her ankle throbbing and ballooning. A woman photographer came over to her and held her hand and talked to her soothingly while the surfing instructor went to find a rescue vehicle. Then some men on the beach helped carry our girl to the vehicle and helped settle her inside, after which the instructor drove into town in search of a medical clinic. The first two were closed. Finally they found a pharmacy staffed by a "lovely woman doctor," according to my daughter. The doctor spoke no English, but there was a woman there who translated the Spanish, and my daughter understood that though her ankle was very painful and she could put no weight on it, no bones were broken. 

Then the doctor brought out a syringe to inject something into the swollen joint and my girl, who is needle phobic, began to hyperventilate and cry. An older Black woman who was shopping in the pharmacy heard her distress. She came over to my daughter and hugged her and stroked her head and tried to comfort her. "She began rubbing my heart," my daughter told us later, unperturbed, because the woman's actions did help to calm her as the doctor administered multiple shots to her ankle and foot. "Honestly, Mom," my daughter said afterward, her voice bright, despite the ordeal she had just been through, "I felt as if I was surrounded by angels the entire time."  

"What did the doctor inject you with?" I inquired.

My daughter, who was back in her hotel room FaceTiming with her husband and me by then, burst out laughing. "I didn't ask," she admitted. "I wasn't even curious. I guess I was just trusting the universe."

I hyperventilated a bit myself at that point, but what could I do? My husband said later the injections were probably a steroid to keep the swelling down.

For the rest of her final day at the beach in Costa Rica she iced and elevated the ankle, ordered room service for dinner, and got around in a wheelchair the hotel provided. She said everyone, to the last person, could not have been kinder and more helpful to her. The next morning, someone at the hotel made her breakfast to go for the hour and a half trip back to the airport, where she would be met by a wheelchair. While she was in the car, I was having my PT session in New York. I called my daughter so that my wonderful physical therapist, Deidre, could give her a few tips for the plane: wriggle your toes, do ankle pumps to the degree your pain will allow, move the leg back and forth from the knee, and ice the ankle if you can. 

Her brother met her at JFK, along with her sister in law and her husband. Her brother brought her crutches and showed her how to use them. On their way to his car, our girl sent her dad and me a picture of her brother pushing her in a wheelchair, big smiles on all their faces and I thought: She's still surrounded by angels. That was the moment when I finally exhaled. 

The next day, our intrepid traveler summed up her Costa Rica experience in a text she sent me: "I had an adventure. And I remembered that I trust that the world. Doesn't stop bad things from happening but I'm surrounded by good energy to bring me through those times." 

May this forever be her truth.

She went for an X-ray to confirm nothing was broken and is now doing PT, recovering slowly. She and her husband are supposed to travel to Paris at the end of the month for her birthday, and her PT person thinks she will be able to make the trip. In the midst of it all, she had a job interview yesterday for an internal transfer at her company, and was up till 3AM the night before finishing a deck for her presentation to the four-person panel. Apparently she aced it, because they offered her the job at the end of the interview. I am in awe of her.

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In news of my own healing, I had my six-week follow up with my surgeon this week, and everything appears to be progressing well. My son drove me to my appointment and waited for me as I underwent X-rays and the physical assessment of my gait and how the joint itself is operating. The new titanium hardware and rotating ball are playing nicely with the bone and surrounding tissue, fusing where needed, rolling as appropriate, and I have now been released from movement precautions. This means I can bend past ninety degrees again, cross my legs, turn my feet inward, bend over a jigsaw puzzle and peer closely at the pieces to my heart's content, and lean far forward to study the flow of sentence on my laptop screen, all without worrying about dislocating the new hip joint. 

I confessed to my physical therapist yesterday that my arthritis flares are back, which I suppose is to be expected given that my post surgery medications have now been stopped, including the twice daily mega doses of aspirin, which served as a blood thinner, and the morning dose of meloxicam, an anti-inflammatory to help tame swelling in the surgical leg. Both of these also nicely throttled back random body pains. But, as I told my husband when I became aware of the old aches returning, "Everything hurts, except the hip, and that is massive." 

In the past, people always insisted to me that the remedy for arthritis pain is movement. Nah, I'd think. That's just more pain. Of course it was. I was walking on a broken limb. But now, when I ache, I find that my actual impulse is to grab my trusty cane and go for a walk. It's what my instinctive brain is telling me to do, and I obey. And it does help. The pain recedes. My body feels more limber. Holy moly, walking actually feels good. 

My son and I had some errands to run after my appointment. In the Whole Foods store, as I trundled along, he said, "Is that pace comfortable for you? Because you might want to slow down." Apparently I was moving faster than he was comfortable with. I walk just fine without the cane at home, but my PT person wants me to use it in public until at least three months post surgery, as apparently the bulk of my healing will occur between six weeks (now) and three months. As well as I feel, and despite my incision being externally sealed, internal restoration is ongoing. I am also working hard in my weekly PT sessions to reawaken and strengthen muscles that I have avoided using for fourteen years. My therapist points out that the cane is a visual cue to people that I'm not yet entirely steady so please don't run me over. I find I'm becoming fond of my cane, which is ironic given how I spurned the use of one when I severely needed it. Oh, me.

At large in the world

My youngest is traveling solo in Costa Rica until mid week, so of course my whole consciousness is there with her, willing her safely from one place to the next, praying constantly for her well being, entreating guardian angels to surround her, and visualizing her laughing and joyful in auras of beautiful light. She just up and decided she wanted a break from the regularly scheduled programming, to reconnect with herself in a tropical place, so off she went, and now I will not take a full breath till she is back home, as much as I admire her agency and sense of the world being hers to experience as she chooses. I trust she will have a wonderful time.

How did my own mother stand it, I belatedly wonder , my traveling solo all over this country and to different parts of the world in my twenties, as a reporter for Life magazine, scouting people and places for stories, before returning with a photographer, often for weeks at a time, to develop fully realized photo essays. I had no fear for myself, but now I'm remembering some of the isolated places I ventured. Some of them opened their arms to me, like Greasewood Canyon, Colorado, and the North Woods of Minnesota, where I reported on hermits; and The Falkand Islands at the foot of South America, when I traveled to find a fleet of perfectly preserved sailing ships wrecked centuries before in their passage around Cape Horn. Other places had a distinctly unfriendly air—Cheyenne, Wyoming, where I visited an archeological dig, even felt a bit unsafe; so many gun racks in pickup trucks emblazoned with confederate flags. But how did my mother endure me being in all those unvetted regions on my own? I confess I was oblivious back then to her possible concerns. Like most twenty somethings, I felt close to invulnerable.

Here's a photo of me in my twenties in the Minnesota North Woods lake area. I've posted it before. I was there with photographer Brian Lanker for a story on a local legend known as Knife Lake Dorothy, who had lived alone on one the Boundary Waters Wilderness islands for fifty years. Then in her seventies, she was the very definition of a powerful and self-directed woman. 

I saw a factoid last night—America has only not been at war for sixteen of its two hundred and fifty years of independence. 

In times such as these, my beloved girl is at large in the world. Never wonder why I pray.