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New Year

My hope for 2017

January 1, 2017

It’s New Year’s Eve 2016. I’m freshly showered, about to get ready to go out.

I’m sitting in my bathrobe when my son, Everest, notices a cut on my leg. First, he crouches down to examine it. Then he kisses it, because that’s how health and wellness works for 2-year-olds. Find the hurt, press lips to it, make it better.

A minute later he carries a pillow over, carefully places it on my leg and says, “Right here. Hold it right here.”

“Why?”

“So you won’t get hurt again,” he says.

It is a fragile thing, this love. Sometimes I don’t want to move for fear of crushing it.

I hold the pillow to my leg for a long time, afraid to let the moment go.  When I finally do, I tell my son that I’m all better, and it’s true. The cut is minimal, unremarkable. It will not leave a scar. But I want my child to know that what he did matters. I want him to know that tenderness has the capacity to heal. That his love is momentous even in its smallness.

Too often it feels like the world is whooshing past, like I’ve been plunged into a loud and rushing river, and this — this tangle of love — is the knotted rope that gives me something to hold on to. It’s pure and precious and good.

We are just a few hours into the new year now, and the future is too far away for any of us to see. It will certainly bring battles and wounds. Some of us will carry scars. Some will never heal.

My hope for 2017 is that as we move forward, we find ways to protect rather than inflict. That in the face of fear, confusion, blind panic, and downright evil, we move from arguments into action. That we find a pillow and apply it liberally.

 

2014: The year I was gutted

December 31, 2014
Photo by peddhapati.

Photo by peddhapati.

 

My 2014 can be summed up with one fact: It took five months for my c-section incision to heal, a wound that should have closed in less than 6 weeks.

I’m not saying this to inspire sympathy or to have a conversation about childbirth in America. Just know that when I say I spent a good deal of my year split wide open, that’s not hyperbole.

There was one moment when I was at home, wildly trying to juggle my crying newborn during a conference call for work. I was bouncing the baby on my hip, walking past the bathroom, and I happened to look in the mirror just as my robe fell open. I saw the lipstick red slash of my incision reflected back at me, and I thought, “I am so broken. So very, very broken.” The idea that I might never be fixed, that my life might never again have a sense of normalcy, was terrible and frightening.

Many days I wondered when I would be whole again; if I would be whole again. The unknown is such a vulnerable place to reside.

Don’t get me wrong — it wasn’t a bad year. I had a lot of achievements: I finished my master’s degree, and I hit a few professional goals. I gave birth to a wild, funny boy, who has wispy hair and gentle cow eyes. I have a husband who inspires me on a daily basis and friends who are generous with their love. Many days were filled with pancakes, dance parties when the baby wouldn’t sleep, sunshine, fairy lights, a new blue dress or two. It was actually an extraordinary year.

This face.

This face.

 

But underscoring all the good things was a new and overwhelming feeling of helplessness — it seemed every time I felt like I was in the driver’s seat, the “service engine” light popped on in the car.

So 2014 was challenging. This was a year of allowing buried things to surface and giving air to raw skin. Watching old wounds heal and waiting for scar tissue to form. Of making peace when things fell beyond my control. Of learning patience. Of being.

Here’s to achieving more balance in 2015.