For the rest of that hour, I tried to hold my tongue and stand back, but when Luke grabbed the bar at the top of the slide and swung like a gorilla before plopping his butt onto the slide, I practically had a heart attack. An image of him falling and breaking his back came to me. I played out the whole scene in my mind: me running up to him and realizing he was badly injured. Luke reaching up for me in utter pain. Me yelling to a mom to call an ambulance. Luke crying and begging me to take the pain away. Me riding in the ambulance with Luke and calling Mark when we arrived at the hospital. Luke ending up in a wheelchair for the rest of his life.
Luke got up off the slide and raced to the swings.
“Luke, NO, honey. No swinging. You might get hurt.” My words caught in my throat. I turned to the women standing next to me and said, “I think I’m coming down with a cold. I’d better get home before I give it to all of you.” It was a lie. But I had to get off that playground.
Of course I understood Luke might get hurt. We all might get hurt. If anyone knew that, I did. But I had never felt this kind of abject, paralyzing fear before: the fear of my child’s imminent death. What did Luke hear in my voice when I forbad him to swing? What was I passing on to him when I hovered beside him at the slide? I didn’t want him infected by my dysfunction and yet I didn’t know how to stop it from happening.
I still saw my therapist Lynn occasionally when I bumped up against myself and faced peeling away another layer of the trauma that had informed my life. I planned to talk to her about my playground anxiety eventually, and then something happened one night that made me get serious about figuring out how to work with my increasing fear.
I was folding clothes on the couch. Luke was sitting in his chair eating Cheerios and drinking juice. In a flash, the way these things happen, he accidentally spilled his juice—just knocked it right off the table onto the floor.
Panic and rage flooded me so quickly I couldn’t catch myself. “Luke! That’s not okay!” I screamed, rushing over from the couch where I was folding laundry. And then under my breath, “Goddamn it!” I hurried over to the counter to grab paper towels, ripping them off with urgency, as if something—what, I didn’t know—depended on everything happening quickly. I rushed over to the table and cleaned up the spill with a vengeance, movements big and rough.
“I didn’t mean to,” he whined as he backed away from me, his eyes cast down, tears welling. His tears brought me back to myself. What in the world was happening to me? I moved over to him and gave him a big hug, fully aware how contradictory this must feel to him. Once minute I’m yelling, the next I’m hugging.
“Luke, it’s okay. I’m sorry I yelled. I know yelling hurts your heart. I’m so sorry.” This wasn’t the first time this had happened or only the second. I heard myself say those words too many times, but that night I wasn’t just in the moment, I was also observing myself.
I was so focused on preventing an accident, I didn’t know how to deal with this latent, frantic anxiety that lay just below the surface, nor did I truly understand its source. What I didn’t understand was why anything unexpected, any disruption, flooded me. What I did know was that in my attempt to manage the possibility that catastrophe was right around the corner, I had wound myself up so tight that Luke was probably starting to feel that he was the problem.
I couldn’t let this go on. I was hurting the very person I was trying to protect.
I made an appointment with Lynn as early as she could get me in after the juice incident. Sitting in her office, the walls lined with books, I asked her, “How can get rid of this hair-trigger panic and anger? I don’t even like myself anymore.”
Lynn probed. “What do you get anxious and mad about?” Even while giving examples of Luke’s and Mark’s minor transgressions and of the playground fiascos, I knew there was something deeper. Lynn had heard enough of my story by this point in our relationship and asked, “Can I tell you what I think?”
“Please.” It would be a load off my shoulders to feel I had an ally.
“I think you were expected to perform, literally and figuratively, too soon after your accident. Tell me, how did you feel standing on your high school stage three months after losing your leg?”
“Honestly, I was a jumbled mess of emotions, from excitement to anger.”
Lynn and I further explored the impact acting in the play had on me, as well as everything else that had happened so quickly after the accident, and how those experiences didn’t allow me to integrate the trauma into my brain—or my heart. I already knew this was true, but I was finally ready to loosen the armor surrounding my heart. “You can’t deal with your children’s humanity if you can’t deal with your own. Tell me, do you want to bring your children into this trauma or do you want them to live their own lives?”
“Well, of course I want them to live their own lives. I don’t want my trauma to be my legacy. But how? How do I let it go?”
“The first step is allowing yourself to be sad, to learn to live in and with your sadness. Though you’ve cried a lot, you constantly fight against being sad, like it’s something you can get out of you and then be done with for good. Colleen, I think you’re very sad.” She paused, looked down at her lap, and then looked up at me.
I felt suddenly naked. And tears filled my eyes. She was right. That was the big and small of every struggle I’d had over the past twenty years. I was sad. Somehow I’d gotten into my head that sadness equaled weakness. Sadness is one of those emotions that thrusts us into vulnerability, like being a freshly molted crab floating in the sea waiting for her fresh shell to harden. And for me being vulnerable was as good as standing out on that freeway again trying to flag down some help. When I was angry, I tricked myself into believing that I wasn’t exposed and didn’t need protection. When I was angry, at least I was in charge of something.
“What would happen, Colleen, if instead of leaving your sadness at the door, you invited your sadness to dinner? Make a place for sadness at your table.”
Well that’s a silly idea, I thought. And then I remembered an evening when I was five years old. I had invited Indian Joe, the imaginary friend I played with out in the backyard, to dinner. Indian Joe knew some of the Native Americans who had felled the large trees in our yard many years ago. He was a kind, gentle, and sad man. Mostly we walked around the yard holding hands and talking. I didn’t know why he was so sad, but I wanted to help him.
Indian Joe agreed to join us for dinner. When we walked inside, Mom was finishing the meal preparations and my older sister, Maureen, had set the table. I went to the silverware drawer and pulled out another setting and, since I couldn’t reach, I asked Maureen to reach into the cupboard for another plate. I took all of this to the table, pushed the plates and silverware over to squeeze in one more place setting. I went into the family room and dragged a chair to the kitchen table. Mom walked over to me, crouched down on her knees and asked, “Colleen, what are you doing?”
“I asked Indian Joe if he wanted to come to dinner. I’m setting him a place.”
“So he said yes?” she prodded.
I nodded. “I want him to sit next to me.”
“Okay, sounds good, honey.” Mom stood up and started bringing the dishes of food to the table.
I spent a lot of time with Indian Joe, and I desperately wanted for him to be real. Mom’s acceptance of him joining us for dinner made me believe that perhaps he was.
After we’d said our prayers, I put a piece of Shake ‘n’ Bake chicken on his plate and some iceberg lettuce salad. He smiled at me and said, “Thank you.” While the rest of the family chattered around the table, Indian Joe and I sat there quietly and I helped him eat his dinner.
Though Indian Joe left my life a few months after that, his presence had been real and made an impact. A scorning word or a sarcastic attack from anyone in my family about his existence could have quickly killed him off, but their acceptance of him gave that relationship strength and allowed me to keep him with me until
I’d made it through that particular developmental stage.
I realized that I did know how to sit with my unseen companion, sadness. I was finally ready to have my new family welcome another member.
“What do you think, Colleen? Can you invite sadness to the table?”
“Yes. I can.”
Lynn had given me permission to just be sad. Sad was normal. And I needed normalcy—true normalcy, more than anything. I’d been striving for it for years. That night at dinner I felt a little silly, but I went ahead and added another place setting to the table, just as I had as a little girl. Luke was oblivious. Mark cocked his eyebrow and asked, “Is someone coming for dinner?”
“I know this is a little ‘out there,’ but I set a place at the table for my sadness. I’m inviting sadness into my life without apology or shame, and this is my way of being intentional about that.”
“Well, okay, then. Welcome, sadness!” Mark said and gave me a quick peck on the cheek as we brought the food to the table. I suspected he was as grateful for the chance to blatantly acknowledge my grief as I was.
I wasn’t born a good mother, I was becoming one. As Luke grew, so did I. Though I’d tried to pass as normal since the accident, I had always focused on appearing to be normal on the physical level. I was learning that normalcy wasn’t experienced on the outside as much as it was an internal experience. So, as Luke learned how to swing from the bars at the playground, I brought normalcy to his childlike moments by not catastrophizing his every move. As I was teaching Luke the safe limits of crossing the street, I was learning to accept my own limits; I couldn’t protect him from everything. As I wiped his tears of sadness over his small losses, I vowed to never “shush” him, to never give him the message that his sadness was a burden for me. And I learned how to mother him from love and not from fear, because I was also learning how to mother the part of me that was still lying on the freeway.
We were both learning how to be normal human beings.
23
SETTING BOUNDARIES
As I slowly made peace with both my strengths and my limitations as a mother, I also gradually became ready to learn how to create healthy boundaries between myself and the world around me. Again, my sweet son would help me learn what I needed to know.
In the summer when Luke was a toddler, I’d put on our bathing suits and my peg leg, the leg I use in the water, and take us to one of Seattle’s parks to play in the wading pool. After spreading out our blanket, I’d get out the sunblock and slather his plump little body with lotion. Resisting like a greased pig, he’d try to squirm away, his eyes on the wading pool.
The first time we went, just as I knew would happen, I felt their eyes prickling my back. As Luke and I made our way across the grass to the pool, their whispers tickled my ears. I fully expected the looks and the whispers. What I didn’t expect was that eventually they would begin to emerge, like the munchkins rising from the plants in the Land of Oz, to peer closely at my leg. Just like Dorothy, I was seen as unusual. Children didn’t often see someone like me. My peg leg, attached to an otherwise normal-looking mom, made me unique. I looked like half suburban mother, half pirate. I walked with the stiff-legged swagger of Captain Ahab. And they couldn’t resist.
“Go ahead and ask her,” I heard one mother whisper to her child.
The little girl, along with some other children, approached me. Some of them were tentative; others came forward with unabashed confidence. But by the time I reached the pool and stepped into the water, there were about six children surrounding Luke and me. Standing in the middle of the wading pool, they peppered me with questions, and each seemed to mirror the personality of the child.
“Eeww, what happened?” asked a cute little girl in a tone of disgust. God, I hate feeling judged by a child, I thought as I composed my answer in my mind.
“I was in a car accident, and my leg got banged up, so the doctors had to take it off,” I replied in a gentle voice.
“Did the car go crash?” asked a grungy little boy who was probably reluctant to leave his tractor in the dirt pile when his mom had called him in to get ready to go to the park.
“Yes, the car went crash.”
“Was there a whole lot of blood?” asked a more timid child, who actually seemed concerned.
“Yes, there was blood, but the doctors made the bleeding stop.”
“Did it hurt?” another wondered.
“Yes, it hurt, but I’m okay now. It was a long time ago.”
“Did you cry?” This from a little boy who was probably trying to gauge how bad it was. If I cried, it was bad.
“Yes, I cried.”
And then a brave child ventured, “Can I touch it?”
Before I could think, I said, “Sure. See, it’s hard because it’s made of plastic. I can’t even feel you touching me.”
After the children took turns touching my leg, squealing as if they’d just gotten away with something sneaky, they slowly dispersed. A few lingered, assuming Luke and I would play with them. I didn’t want to hurt their feelings by ignoring them, so I half-heartedly attempted to engage with them. Luke tugged on my hand and looked up at me with pleading eyes. I took him to the park because I wanted him to be the center of my universe. Instead, and without inviting it, I had become the center of all these children’s universes for a few minutes. I looked at his face and felt like I had failed him.
As we drove home that afternoon, I realized that Luke had just heard the story of how I’d lost my leg for the first time. I’d had fantasies of telling him this story when he was older—in some very intentional way that would help him understand without making him feel scared. But I hadn’t known how to fend off the children at the park without hurting their feelings, so the story had spilled out. And now there it was.
There it was over and over again that summer, too. The same scene repeated itself every time Luke and I went to the wading pool. I felt the same discomfort every time. And every time, I looked at Luke’s face afterward and wished I had a way to tell the other children to go away.
On a hot day late that summer, as we were getting ready to go to the wading pool, Luke asked, “Mommy, can you stop talking about your leg at the park?” His request said it all. It told me he was tired of hearing the same questions and the same answers. He was tired of his mommy being singled out at the playground. He was tired of my divided attention.
I knew I was tired of the questions, too, but I didn’t know how else to handle them besides to answer. I tried to think back to my prying curiosity in my younger years with Linda, Becky, Rashid, and Gary—how I had wanted to know their stories so badly. They had kept their boundaries with me, had decided for themselves what they would and wouldn’t talk about. But I couldn’t remember how they’d done it. I only remembered my longing to find compatriots in my pain and the embarrassment I felt when I pried too deeply.
I couldn’t count on the children at the park to figure out that they were out of line. I’d need to learn how to draw boundaries for myself—and for Luke.
Later in the week, sitting across from Lynn in her office, I posed the question to her, “Can I stop answering the children’s questions?”
I saw the familiar twinkle in her eye when she knew we were onto something big. I still wanted an easy way out of uncomfortable situations, even after all this time of learning that life was often an uphill climb, but those eyes told me this one would require me to stretch my comfort zone.
“Why do you answer their questions?” she posed.
“Why? Because they ask.”
“Yes, but why do you answer?”
I paused to consider. Why did I answer them? Then it hit me. “Because I feel responsible to these children. I want to relieve their fear of people who look different. I want to prove to them I’m normal and not a freak.”
As we talked more, I remembered my youthful disgust of the boy in my high school choir class who had a deformed arm. I recalled my visceral fears and sick feelings about him
and other people with missing body parts. Before my accident, a body with a missing part made me want to throw up. I didn’t want people to feel that way about me. So telling the story of my accident made me a real person, a victim who had no choice about what her body looked like, and not just some disgusting freak. I was still fighting my own disgust by trying to prevent others from feeling it about me.
And then Lynn said something that blew my mind.
“You know, you don’t have to answer their questions. You don’t have to take care of them or make them comfortable.” She went so far as to say, “It’s the children’s parents’ job to tell their children what happened and to help them manage their feelings.”
I considered this. “Well, I don’t want the parents coming up to me and asking all their questions.” That would be worse.
She suppressed a laugh. “No, they probably won’t. You just tell the kids to go ask their parents what happened.”
Whatever she was getting at still wasn’t sinking in. “But they don’t know what happened.”
She nodded, seeing I was struggling. “True. But all they need to know is that you lost your leg and you wear a prosthetic leg to compensate. That’s all the children need to know. And you don’t have to be the one to tell them that.”
Finally, a realization was coming over me like warm water in a shower. “You mean, I don’t need to be responsible for all these children?” Wow. I thought. Was she giving me permission to let other people deal with their own curiosity and feelings about my missing limb?
“Do adults ask questions about your leg, too?” She peered over her glasses.
“Yes, a lot.”
“Do you answer them?”
“Well, yes. I don’t want to be rude. I want to be nice.”
I had spent the last twenty years answering every single tactless question about my accident to avoid being rude to people. People didn’t seem to realize their questions, especially the persistent questions that dug deeper into the specifics of the accident, forced me to open up my precious little cargo bin of memories. Having been conscious during the entire accident, except for the one fraction of a second when my leg was severed, my memory of losing my leg was crystal clear. If I knew anything, I knew I couldn’t dwell on those memories for long without moving into a trauma response. At least once a week over the last twenty years some stranger asked me to recount that day. I could never talk about the accident without a little lump swelling up in my throat. And yet I couldn’t be rude, could I? So I perfected a glib attitude and a wave of my hand to dismiss how sad it was. I walked away from those brief encounters with strangers feeling my glibness was a betrayal of my tender self. I then had to put those memories back in the cargo bin and stuff them under the bed of my heart after each encounter.
A Leg to Stand On Page 19
