I have been told on three memorable occasions that I am, quite literally and extraordinarily, tightly-wound.
Two of those occasions were childbirth. When the anesthesiologists came to insert their horse needles into my spine to allow for the delivery of The Kid and Little Brother, both doctors asked if I was an elite athlete. After I finished laughing, I assured them I wasn’t, to which they replied that the muscles they had to penetrate (that’s what she said) to give me my epidurals were shockingly tense and hard. I knew the truth: that it isn’t marathons that bought me those muscles, but anxiety. Carrying the world, unasked and unnecessarily, on my back and shoulders for decades.
The other time was during my 60 km hike this past March, when one of the onsite trainers gave me a quick therapeutic rubdown (twss) and remarked that he’d never felt such tight hamstrings. It wasn’t a compliment as much as the registering of shock. He seemed to be in disbelief that my legs were actually functioning.
So yes. I am…tightly coiled, if you will.
So is TK. Any deviation from the usual will get, at the very least, a remark from him; a recognition of the change, and, often, an expression of displeasure about it. Another thing: he does not like to be, as he puts it, messy around others. Sure, when it’s just the four of us at a restaurant, he’ll go hog wild on a bowl of pasta with red sauce and only upon finishing it will he casually ask for help cleaning up his face so that it no longer looks like a crime scene. But around his peers, he is careful about looking presentable. He only partakes in certain foods–the time I bought him pasta from the canteen for lunch he came home and, even though he had pre-approved it, made it clear that this would not be a viable choice going forward: “Why did you get me messy food?!”
Because these are the terms of his existence, I was bracing myself last week as he ran toward me on the school playground before the bell rang to start the day. He was coated in thick mud on the bottom front of his shirt and on the back of it, not to mention the seat of his pants, which were just plain solid brown. I prepared myself for tears, for demands to go home (and, likely, stay there). Instead, he grinned at me. “I fell in the MUD!” he announced, followed quickly behind by his friend, who was even worse shape. “I’m such a MESS!”
His therapist took them to the office and got them sorted with new clothes after he announced to the staff that he needed HELP. When he returned to his class, apparently, he was still riding a high from his adventure.
Some people, like his speech therapist, refer to such moments as “small surprises.” I call them miracles.
These are the seismic events recognisable as such only to those of us who have been brought low–by which I mean, more deeply into ourselves than we ever wanted to go, beyond the realm of what we ever would have chosen and past it into a world where relief is not defined by a kid getting into the right school, but making it through brain surgery. Where gratitude is not limited to a good grade but safe passage across the planet into a new life. Where the world, and my own heart, is no longer manageable because its borders are past my control, because it has been blown open by love and grace into something bigger and deeper than I ever imagined.
Like I said, I never would have chosen it. This explosion was not an act of bravery on my part, but a seismic shift that, first, was endured. And–slowly, painfully, eventually–embraced.
When I moved to New York fourteen years ago, I had to laugh at people who called me brave as though they had just asked if I were an elite athlete. I wasn’t brave–I was desperate! I had run out of men to date in Alabama and I was running from the ones I’d already been through. Everyone I knew seemed to be married with kids or getting that way. I needed an escape route.
But then…then came some bravery, after all.
There was the moment I admitted to The Husband, who then was a friend, how I felt. Not the moment at night when I was drunk, but the one the next morning over the phone. The one followed by a year: of broken then restored friendship, of hope giving way to trust then to hope again, then of everything. These are the moments of bravery–the ones that come after the explosion we never had the bravery to choose. When we admit the thing that’s hard to admit:
This is hard.
I was wrong. I’m sorry.
I need help.
I’m a mess.
Most days lately, I look down and see, on my hands, the mark of being the boys’ mother: the love heart on my wrist that serves as a button to match TK’s, to stay connected throughout the day. The squiggle taking up my whole palm, which is LB’s signature, his claim and his version of that connection, always singular and larger-than-life, like him. They are becoming themselves more every day–their beautiful, messy selves, and as so often happens when people become more who they truly are, I’m loving them more because of it.
And the other night, as TH slept off the sickness I gave him upstairs, I lay between these boys and awoke in the middle of the night to their breathing. And to the unmistakable briny smell of the beach–a smell that, at any other stage in my life, I would have had to write off to a dream. But now, now, we live metres from a harbour. And this anxious spine of mine, this anxious mess that I am, has been relocated to salty shores that rock me to sleep each night, often between two boys. Which is a dream–an unmanageable, messy dream–that happens to be real.