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Mukilteo, Washington

Driving back to Seattle from the Mukilteo ferry last week, my daughter said the trees and houses were in the way of her seeing the water and mountains. “The sky pretends to be water and the clouds pretend to be snow-covereds,” she said.

Because I am or have been:

1) A rule follower, and

2) Timid, and always, still learning how to write,

I have tended to write stories that are mostly linear.  I might mess with the order of things but there is usually only one layer of story happening.  As a writer, more than that confuses me.  Until recently.

Last spring, I set out to write an essay about stuff, the physcial stuff that fills my house.  I forced all these ideas (William Morris!  Feng shui!  The long-kept dead canary in a close relative’s freezer!) into the salad bowl of words until it was a big mess (kinda like my closet).  But instead, what emerged was that I actually needed to write an essay about my childhood house that burned down, and, alongside it, growing naturally from that fire, a ghost story (two ghost stories, as it turned out, because I thought the narrator was the ghost, but it was actually the boy whose father was the fire chief orchestrating the planned burning of the house.  I’ll save the ghost POV for a parallel story, I think.)  These last three layers (of fire) all turned out to be strata of the burning house “story” which is inspired by my own experiences.  As the mess emerged (“wretched from my spirit” as I once described some of my friend Mark Horiuchi‘s ceramic art, which was “wretched from his spirit”) I realized I wanted to mess with my automatic stance of linear narrative.  For the essay about the burned down house where I used to live, I set out to build layers, to mimic the memories as they occurred to me.  Really, I was attempting a weak tea imitation of Joan Didion’s glorious memoir, The Year of Magical Thinking.  My essay is still an unfinished mess.

There is something in me that until very recently has always believed stories actually are (or worse, somehow should be) linear.  Believed that, trick around with things as writers might, the human being who reads actually needs, on some biological level, a pattern that makes sense.  But I’m starting to see more deeply into the crusts, the layers, how much there is (or can be, some day, if we work hard enough at simultaneous clarity and opacity) under the patina of the linear.

Like layers of paint, the story starts to peel away, revealing hidden stories and complexities and differing perceptions.

Like multiple transparencies (remember those, before PowerPoint?) in slightly different languages I try to make something that’s more complicated (on purpose! Take that, William Strunk!) but that still has some sort of shape, so it’s not chaos exactly, but a sort of artifice, imitating the mess that is realness while also, by the end of the thing, amounting to something, making some sort of sense or logic or scaffolding, a pattern, no matter how faint or possibly only visible to the eye of the writer.  (I did say “try.”)

(What was I saying?)

I still want things to make sense.  Maybe it’s my primal need.  Writing a story that’s relatively linear, like arranging and organizing things in my home, gives me a false sense of control, as if I can shape the unshapable.  The problem, maybe, is that no matter how we play, words can only roll out one letter at a time, it’s how they are made, so there’s no avoiding the linear, and facts and feelings tend not to adhere to my yearning for order, tend to sprawl out like oversized legs in the aisle of a plane, tend to bump against the cart that delivers (via lovely manicured hands) peanuts and near-dry, immasculated slices of lime in tonic.

I don’t want to open a book and have the letters fall off the page, I just don’t.

But then you realize there is a large-ish ball of magenta fuzz on the seat back in front of you and although you have been staring at it, off and on, for two hours, you will never know the air-traveler who left it there for you to stare at while your plane bumps in the air, what is this metal machine bumping against, exactly? for it must be something there, or how can air have such an impact?  Somehow, we have to live in all this not-knowing, not ever being able to know whose fuzz we are staring at without even realizing it.

This is not my daughter. I stole this image from http://www.visualphotos.com.

In walking through the thick murk of life “after” my daughter’s accident when she lost part of each finger on her left hand, I have been thinking and reading a lot about pity.  From the free online dictionary:

pit·y (pt)

1. Sympathy and sorrow aroused by the misfortune or suffering of another.

I appreciate real sympathy–it’s one of the things that has gotten us through this.  But I’ve seen pity on the faces of strangers, and it’s of a different shade than mere sympathy. Waiting in the surgeon’s office for a check-up, others sit silently and smile those lopsided smiles full of benevolence, and selfish relief. I imagine even beloved friends might feel it for us right now, along with gratitude that it didn’t happen to their kids. (I bet I’d feel the same way: sympathy, compassion, and glad it wasn’t us. This is human!) But very soon after realizing how the change in my daughter’s hand might change our lives, I had a visceral wave of wanting absolutely no pity. Not for her, not for me, not for us.

Today I was reminded of the rightness of my reaction.

For the first time since her accident, we went to the playground at the Antioch School where she will begin nursery school in September. The last time we were there, she had climbed, fearless as is her wont, to the top of the blue jungle gym. (I blogged about that moment here.) Today, she climbed up, not to the top, but just about. She slipped a couple of times, but wasn’t hurt, and was unfazed. As she climbed, I coached a bit more than I would like, and more than I did last time, reminding her to pay attention to her feet, and feel her body. (This is something I hope to instill in her throughout her life, wanting, for the eventual woman she will be: root-like grounding, and trusting of the gut, that intuition that flows without effort from our bodies, in which dwell our souls.) Today, she was so proud of what she could do. As I witnessed her work, I was aware of my own body quieting down, being exquisitely present, breathing through my own fear of her falling or getting hurt. (Her surgeon seems petrified at the thought of her re-injuring her hand. I am too. But dammit, I wanted her to climb!) When she reached her near-top destination, I praised her but showed no surprise. For, some little shard in me knew she could do this.

She asked about the monkey bars. This question of monkey bars has been clunking around in me since the accident. How will her hands grasp and support her weight when she’s sustaining her entire body? Will she ever be able to cross those bars? Today I told her that when she’s bigger, she will be able to hold herself up and cross them. She wanted to try. I held her up; she grabbed hold of a rung with both hands. I told her I could hold on or let go. She wanted me to let go. I was below her, ready to catch.

I let go.

She held on.

She didn’t fall.

She dropped gracefully after a moment of dangle, and I was there, surrounding her with my arms. “You did it!” I said.

Of course she did it. I knew she could, but seeing was another thing.

I believe this strong, amazing child (who the hell can display such bias, if not her mother?) needs no pity. She may need some other things.  She needs a world that allows for (and celebrates) all the ways we do what we do.  I know she will teach me plenty along the way.

I know how lucky I am that she’s here with me now.

Life for my family has changed since my last post, in ways I will not count.  I want to be the woman who wrote that post, without wavering.  But now I have to fight the urge to protect my daughter like a china cup.

These are facts: On July 5, 2011, my daughter had an accident.  The four fingers on her left hand were detached part way down.  Her middle and ring fingers were too damaged to be re-attached, so are now shorter.  Her pointer and pinkie finger tips were able to be re-attached–we now wait and see if they “take.”  Her thumb was unharmed–excellent in terms of the ultimate function of her left hand.  She is out of bandages and her hand is healing, blue fringey stitches tickling my face as I read to her before bedtime about Piglet and Pooh and all the other sweet creatures in that fictional world.

There are facts, and there’s everything else.  Mostly the everything else is a rock-tumbler inside myself, shining up emotions, thoughts, and wonderings as they clunk around in my brain.  Luckily some of the stones in my head include amazement at the unexpected beauty and grace this accident has brought into our lives.  So many people are sending love and support and gifts and food and the list is endless.  We are lucky.

Merida’s courage and strength through this has been astonishing.  For truly: children are 100% brave and strong and if we step aside and give them space, and love, they know how to heal.  They lead us.  They help us heal.  We are lucky.

And then I think about how I haven’t been able to post here, how at first I couldn’t even write in my journal (for one thing, there was no time, but also, if I wrote it down it would mean it was real, that it really happened.)  And now I look up at the subtitle of my blog, which I change periodically, and find the most recent tag is a line from a Cure song that always haunts me.  From “Pictures of You” the line goes:

I’ve been looking so long at my pictures of you that I almost believe that they’re real…

There are photos of her hand before the accident that are impossible to linger with, impossible not to linger with.  There are photos since the accident, which at first I forced myself to take, beautiful photos, taken knowing that she (and we) will want a chronicle of her healing.  Knowing that this is now her hand, her beautiful hand, and we are so lucky.  Accepting that this is now how we are; this is how it is for us.  She can use her left hand well, better every day, despite the injury; she still considers herself left-handed, and because before the accident, she was very strongly left-handed, she is using it now without thinking, which will help healing, and function, and help her feel like herself.  Yesterday, for the first time, she played her grandmother’s violin, testing it out, to see how it feels, using both hands, making noise, bowing with her left hand.  We are so lucky.

Yet it’s so hard for me to look at any pictures of her hand prior to July 5, 2011.  All the bile I’ve absorbed my entire life about how a person (a girl, a woman, in particular) looks, all the propaganda and the noise joins the rocks in my head and clunks around in the mental tumbler, and I push them aside and try to stop caring about such unimportance, because I believe she will use her whole self: mind, spirit, voice, heart, body (including her left hand!) for greatnesses we cannot even anticipate.  But lookism seeps in, coats the rocks with rancid unshine, and I keep trying to rinse it off.  Must quickly come up with the antidote to hurtful things that other people will say to her, who knows when.  Must indoctrinate her well so she feels a clear, sweet resolve when she uses whatever comebacks or affirmations we can think of that amount to, “We all have damage, some visible, some not.  Nothing to see here–move along.”

When she was one month old, I wrote about filing the nails of her baby hand.  The post was entitled “Safety” and it was about keeping her from scratching her face with sharp baby nails.  I had no idea what her future would hold.  Still don’t!  And every fucking metaphor seems to involve hands, “what her future would hold,” the writer typed, thinking of hands, focussing on how her daughter still has two beautiful hands that work, and how the child is still alive and whole and strong and amazing.

We make the world.  We make it!  We color it, we frame it, we choose words and metaphors and say what we say to each other, and we love or dent or harm each other as we make the world, as we believe what we believe about each other.  I don’t want pity for her or for us.  I will make her world a fair and loving place.  She will know from our hearth that she is strong and amazing and beautiful and that she can do whatever she chooses to do; she will know that fact with every part of herself.

This story may be huge in her life for a while but it will not be her only story.

(Nous sommes embarques!)