ReinventedVoices

...Which is always a dangerous thing. There is, you  know, a Part III to the hospital stuff. The next to last operation on my back involved a month long stay that was, well, bizarre. As opposed to what, you asked? As opposed to most anything I've heard of in a hospital stay, but, then, this is me we're talking about, so who knows?

I have decided, though, that perhaps it would be wise to give everyone a break from all that for a time. When I look at the stories that I write in here, on my blog, I realize it makes sense to me that one follower mentioned the need for a stiff drink while reading. I am afraid that sometimes so much bleak is in here that people might not know that I DO see the good. Everywhere. All around me.

Otherwise I pretty much know I'd be dead. Just like Marley in A Christmas Carol. I'd have been dead years before surgery even happened. I was finding a very convoluted path to suicide, but slow suicide it was, indeed. I trusted dangerous men. I put myself in potentially dangerous situations. I ran and ran and ran until I'd hit a brick wall, contracting mono, driving when I'd been awake more than sixty hours straight. I booked myself up so much with activities, I had no time for food at one point. And, let's not forget, I tried to work when I could barely walk. I lost about 45 pounds in eight weeks before my first operation. I would take the highway to work, pulling off once to throw up, then run to the ladies' room when we arrived at work to throw up again. I had migraines that were so severe that I could not see and would be found IN the stacks, curled up on the floor. Still I went to work.

This was not dedication. This was terror. This is someone who did not feel her life mattered at all, to anyone. No one paid attention except to tell me how nice and thin I was. Now, if only I'd fix those teeth of mine, maybe I would be a real looker. My HAIR was falling out, but what they noticed was that I was thin.

One true friend simply took my hand (The mom of my niece and nephew of whom I write periodically) and said, "Jeannette. You're DYING. For God's sake, please go back to the doctor." I was shocked that it mattered. One can get into such a dark place sometimes.

I was so accustomed to the bizarre that it was hard to see that getting help was the thing to do, but I did it. With help. As I mentioned way back in an entry from 2009 Blaming Mom--the Good Old Days we can (and I did) give away too much power when we refuse to take credit for any of the good, just as we do when we refuse to accept responsibility for the bad. I had not thought of that before I got help, more than twenty years ago now. Until my friend, and then two more, reminded me that perhaps I did deserve to take up space on the planet, if not for my sake, then for theirs, I figured I should just keep on slogging along until I dropped.

Anyway, it occurs to me sometimes that I do not write enough of the wonder of my life... it occurs to me even as I look back and realize I've not written about one of the most unbelievably horrible times of my life: my daughter's death.  Still, out of each of the times when life was spinning out of control--even that one-- there truly were these times of utter grace, when I do not feel that I consciously  made decisions that kept my temper in check, that allowed me the distance to accomplish what I had to, or to endure, that allowed me to look at the big picture of what needed to be done, to be taken care of. Something else gave me knowledge to draw from. We can call it dumb luck. We can call it grace. We can call it really good assimilation of subconscious messages my brain received from events around me. Some may call it God.

I call it Grace. By that I simply mean that the ability to walk or live or breathe through hell arrived from someplace I do not understand, and that does not bear analysis. Grace came to me from the time I was not yet four and my brother stepped on that board on my hand to squish a mouse, and it arrived at uncountable times from then on. Just in time to save my heart from breaking, or the innocence from being destroyed, something would seem to be given to me out of thin air--beauty, a person, a book, an animal, even. That is the biggest miracle of all. Somehow or other, there is innocence in me still, at sixty... That same innocence I had at four.

Is that the best gift of all? I can be transported by snow on leaves, as can just about everyone whose blog I visit. Maybe that's what writers, musicians, artists of every medium manage to keep. Even if we couch it in witty cynicism and sardonic humor, I suspect it lurks there anyway... despite our best efforts to say otherwise. But it is there for me, underlying most of the passages I write that receive the most emotional responses.

The child named Jetty has not once left my side for anything, at any time in my life. She led me to safety when I had to disappear. The wise, older voice came at the hospital. My counselor was afraid at one point, that perhaps I had managed to separate myself into different entities, but as we went along, she did not think so. Even though I have had the sense that there were distinct and sometimes warring voices in my head, I've always had a part that knew it was all me. For the sake of expressing the feeling, I have the voices, the "committee in my head" that sets up a might cacophony at times.

No matter what happened in my life, though, do not suppose for a moment that I want anyone else's life. Odd as it may seem, I want my own. I simply want to do a better job of living it is all. I want to feel that I made a difference somewhere when I leave and sometimes I feel I've wasted the gifts I was given. Perhaps that's how most people feel as they approach various milestones. My life is a roller coaster, yup. But it is also the height of spring and deep summer as well. It's a full moon night and an exaggerated low tide, with treasures just below the surface of the sand. It's standing on a mountain, wind in my face, seeing a world stretch out before me.  And in even some of the smallest of moments, it can be the first May sun on my face. My family really was a rain forest: lush and rotting with little in between. Southern in the sense that we had so many layers, but they were distinctly northern layers. Granite. Seasonal plantings. My family had its distinct seasons that were predictable in their beauty and their horror, in their lushness and harshness.

I hope that I give enough of the beauty, and not just the pain. I guess that's why I work on memoir, the symphony, not just the fragments. And I hope that one day it may resonate with other people who struggled with the dichotomies of their own lives... that it can help others as I was helped, to see and feel the beauty abutting all the pain. I want to find the balance in my work, to show that the beauty WAS all around me, even when I hit bottom so very many times. I did not put the beauty there--I simply was lucky enough to see it, to feel it, to be saved by it.

And I was and am lucky.

Anyway, I'm just saying...

Part III is almost ready, but I think I'll let it breathe. Let all of you breathe. And start reading and refilling the well with the rain forest stories all of YOU tell so well. Thank you all so much for coming along for the ride that has been my life, and for supporting me so much as I write that ride!